Re: Request for Info

Kragen Sitaker (kragen@pobox.com)
Sun, 21 Feb 1999 00:59:52 -0500 (EST)


On Sat, 20 Feb 1999, Tom Whore wrote:
> Im looking for folks or urls for XML DTDs relating to library or
> bibliography, that have anything to do with the MARC format to query
> librarys or not.

I don't know much about MARC. I do know that I tried to put together a
3NF ERD for the stuff I wanted to do with my personal library, and
ended up with a thing with a couple of dozen different tables, and
realized that the MARC format (which I'd seen at a previous library)
makes things considerably easier.

Basically, a MARC record has a bunch of fields; each field has a type.
You can have a bunch of fields of the same type in the same record; you
don't need to have fields of any particular type in any record.

This simplifies representing things like books, where you usually have
zero or more authors, zero or more subjects, zero or more copies, etc.

But this is all guesswork -- don't trust it! Let me know if you learn
more.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Computers are the tools of the devil. It is as simple as that. There is no
monotheism strong enough that it cannot be shaken by Unix or any Microsoft
product. The devil is real. He lives inside C programs. -- philg@mit.edu