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I'm not a big user of MARCXML, but I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head: - Existing libraries for reading, manipulating and searching XML-based documents are very mature. - Documents can be validated for their "well-formedness" using these existing tools and a pre-defined schema (a validator for MARC would need to be custom-coded) - MARCXML can easily be incorporated into XML-based meta-metadata schemas, like METS. - It can be parsed and manipulated in a web service context without sending a binary blob over the wire. - XML is self-describing, binary is not. There's nothing stopping you from reading the MARCXML into a binary blob and working on it from there. But when sharing documents from different institutions around the globe, using a wide variety of tools and techniques, XML seems to be the lowest common denominator. -Andrew On 2010-10-25, at 2:38 PM, Nate Vack 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