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Cloutman, David writes: > I'm open to seeing new approaches to the ILS in general. A related > question I had the other day, speaking of MARC, is what would an > alternative bibliographic data format look like if it was designed > with the intent for opening access to the data our ILS systems to > developers in a more informal manner? I was thinking of an XML > format that a developer could work with without formal training, > the basics of which could be learned in an hour, and could > reasonably represent the essential fields of the 90% of records > that are most likely to be viewed by a public library patron. I read this and immediately thought, "oh, that's MODS": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata_Object_Description_Schema Then I read on through the thread and found that Stuart Yeates recommeded TEI instead. Then I read on a few more messages, and found that Alex Dolski though Dublin Core XML was the answer. Then I read on a bit further, a found half a dozen people arguing for RDF, triplestores and topic maps. (I fact, the only thing that _no-one_ has recommended is anything based on RDA :-) ) I'm not sure what to make of this except to say that Yet Another XML Bibliographic Format is NOT the answer! ... anyway, all of this is far, far away from the point. MARC is old and ugly yes; but then so am I, and I get the job done, just like MARC. That format is responsible for about 0.2% of our difficulties, and replacing it would make essentially no difference to anything that we actually care about. _/|_ ___________________________________________________________________ /o ) \/ Mike Taylor <[log in to unmask]> http://www.miketaylor.org.uk )_v__/\ "_Scelidosaurus_ [is] vastly more important for understanding dinosaur anatomy & evolution than yet another dromaeosaur (can't believe I just wrote that, even though it's true)" -- Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.