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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 [log in to unmask] http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/ @gluejar