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MODS was an attempt to mostly-but-not-entirely-roundtrippably represent data in MARC in a format that's more 'normal' XML, without packed bytes in elements, with element names that are more or less self-documenting, etc. It's caught on even less than MARCXML though, so if you find MARCXML under-adopted (I disagree), you won't like MODS. Personally I think MODS is kind of the worst of both worlds. The only reason to stick with something that looks anything like MARC is to be round-trippable with legacy MARC, which MODS is not. But if you're going to give that up, you really want more improvements than MODS supplies, it's still got a lot of the unfortunate legacy of MARC in it. Nate Vack wrote: > On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Tim Spalding <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > >> - XML is self-describing, binary is not. >> >> Not to quibble, but that's only in a theoretical sense here. Something >> like Amazon XML is truly self-describing. MARCXML is self-obfuscating. >> At least MARC records kinda imitate catalog cards. >> > > Yeah -- this is kinda the source of my confusion. In the case of the > files I'm reading, it's not that it's hard to find out where the > nMeasurement field lives (it's six short ints starting at offset 64), > but what the field means, and whether or not I care about it. > > Switching to an XML format doesn't help with that at all. > > WRT character encoding issues and validation: if MARC and MARCXML are > round-trippable, a solution in one environment is equivalent to a > solution in the other. > > And I think we've all seen plenty of unvalidated, badly-formed XML, > and plenty with Character Encoding Problems™ ;-) > > Thanks for the input! > -Nate > >