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On Mon, 26 Mar 2007, Rob Styles wrote: > Does your work draw on any of the work Devon has been doing over at > OCLC? > > http://www.code4lib.org/2006/smith > No, this is the first I've heard of it, but thank you for the link. I will not be including the parts of the IWF Metadata Harvester in the GNU Metadata Exchange Utilities that were intended to take OAI and Pica data and put them into a third format. The task is difficult and I don't see the point. On the other hand, a mapping among OAI, Pica, USMARC, and/or formats could be very useful, but would require a great deal of work and some compromises. It's simply not possible to find one-to-one correspondences for all cases. I believe the first task should be to make it possible to retrieve, store, and query data in the basic formats first. OAI isn't too difficult, because of the limited number of classifications, but I have to deal with XML. Porting to GNU/Linux makes it necessary to use a different approach than the one I used before. I believe the approach I've used for Pica works well, and would be appropriate for USMARC (and possibly other formats) as well. Roughly speaking, the idea is to have a function for each field, while some categories require a function, while others don't. I'm not sure whether anyone is really interested in Pica. Pica seems to be used primarily in Germany and the Netherlands. If no one is interested, I think I could use my time better by switching to USMARC. Laurence