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Does anybody here know of a MARC2OAI program? A few days ago on the NGC4Lib mailing list there was some discussion on how authority (as well as bibliographic) records could be shared among libraries. One answer, proposed by Stephens Owen, was OAI. After thinking about it a bit more, I think this is entirely feasible. For example, such a system could work like this: 1. Dump MARC records to a file system. 2. Ingest records into a simple database with fields such as local key, foreign key, date stamp, deleted record flag, and record in communications format. To implement OAI sets, the database may be normalized into a small number of tables for things like author names, series, formats, and main subject headings. 3. Implement an OAI interface against the database complete with Dublin Core, MARCXML, & MODS metadata schemas. 4. Provide a means to mark database records as deleted as well as to add additional records. 5. Go to Step #1. Given the existence of N number of such implementations, libraries could then do a number of things such as: * Harvest their own content, index it, and provide rudimentary access to the "catalog". * Harvest other library's content, index it, and create a "union catalog". * Harvest selected content from many repositories, index it, and create a topic-specific catalog. * Harvest content, combine it with other OAI-accessible content, and create a "more than just books" catalog. * Harvest content, index it, search it, and download a MARC record in communications format facilitating a sort of copy cataloging process. So, do you know of any software in existence that makes it relatively trivial to make a set of MARC records in communications format accessible as an OAI data provider? -- Eric Lease Morgan University Libraries of Notre Dame (574) 631-8604