Re: More on ALA

[Matthew Beacom <matthew.beacom@yale.edu>]

I did not get to attend the os program at ALA, but I was at the meeting of
MARBI and CCDA and second Karen's comment about the interest in XML and MARC as
a pair. I also agree that the 0SS4LIB group is an excellent partner for MARBI
and other interested groups in ALAland. Tools for non-programmers to use to
work with metadata in XML would be a great set of projects. 

The discussion Karen refers to centered on Dick Miller's work on XMLMARC at
Stanford Medical Library. See http://xmlmarc.stanford.edu/ for details on his
work and see http://xmlmarc.stanford.edu/ALAbkgrnd.htm for a background
paper he
prepared as part of the MARBI/CCDA meeting. His project was mentioned in
American Libraries in April 1999. See http://www.ala.org/alonline/ts/ts400.html

It was noted in the discussion at that the MARC standards office at LC (see
http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/ ) has created an SGML DTD for MARC. I'm not aware of
any application of that DTD.

In May 1996 the MARC DTDs, (DTD fragments), SGML declarations, and entity
reference files were put up on a FTP site by the Library of Congress. Work on
the MARC-to-SGML conversion utilities began in July 1996 and were installed at
LC in Jan. 1998. See http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/marcsgml.html

I wonder if the MARC standards office is interested in making MARC DTDs in XML
and how soon they could make them. Perhaps that is one thing the MARBI group
may act on.

Matthew Beacom


Matthew Beacom
Catalog Librarian for Networked Information Resources
Yale University Library
(203) 432-4947
matthew.beacom@yale.edu
http://www.library.yale.edu/~mbeacom