I think you'd have a very hard time demonstrating any speed advantage to MARC over MARCXML. XML parsers have been speed optimized out the wazoo; If there exists a MARC parser that has ever been speed-optimized without serious compromise, I'm sure someone on this list will have a good story about it.

On Oct 25, 2010, at 3:05 PM, Patrick Hochstenbach wrote:

> Dear Nate,
> 
> There is a trade-off: do you want very fast processing of data -> go for binary data. do you want to share your data globally easily in many (not per se library related) environments -> go for XML/RDF. 
> Open your data and do both :-)
> 
> Pat
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> On 25 Oct 2010, at 20:39, "Nate Vack" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I've just spent the last couple of weeks delving into and decoding a
>> binary file format. This, in turn, got me thinking about MARCXML.
>> 
>> In a nutshell, it looks like it's supposed to contain the exact same
>> data as a normal MARC record, except in XML form. As in, it should be
>> round-trippable.
>> 
>> What's the advantage to this? I can see using a human-readable format
>> for poorly-documented file formats -- they're relatively easy to read
>> and understand. But MARC is well, well-documented, with more than one
>> free implementation in cursory searching. And once you know a binary
>> file's format, it's no harder to parse than XML, and the data's
>> smaller and processing faster.
>> 
>> So... why the XML?
>> 
>> Curious,
>> -Nate

Eric Hellman
President, Gluejar, Inc.
41 Watchung Plaza, #132
Montclair, NJ 07042
USA

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