As the author of one of the proposed JSON serialization strategies, let me recommend that we let my proposal - known as "marc-hash" -- disappear quietly into the ether :-)
I propose we get behind the MARC-in-JSON structure ([2]; also see [5]). It's clean and as concise as it can be given what few rules we can count on in MARC. It is also (a) no harder to implement or slower to parse/create than any other marc-in-json propsoal and (b) has a structure which more easily lends itself to JSON query languages (e.g., JSONQuery, JSONPath) such as those exposed by CouchDB and other NoSQL datastores. The spec hosted at the OCLC [3] is verbose/self-documenting (depending on your point of view) in the same was MARC-XML is, with all the advantages and disadvantages that implies. Note that as of this point, the marc-in-json spec goes as high as the Record object. A set of records could be represented by, say, the obvious JSON-array of Record objects (which may necessitate a JSON pull-parser if you've got a bunch of them) or using some sort of End-of-Record delimiter - I'm a fan of eliminating optional-whitespace newlines from the JSON and putting one JSON object on each line ("newline-delimited JSON") for easy-peasy processing. In addition to this branch now for Perl (Yea!), MARC-in-JSON is also already baked into the standard Ruby[6] and PHP[7] MARC libraries, with a (relatively crude) add-on available for the Java marc4j[8] library as well. (Python, anyone?) -Bill- [5] http://robotlibrarian.billdueber.com/sizespeed-of-various-marc-serializations-using-ruby-marc/ [6] https://github.com/ruby-marc (via the #to_hash method) [7] http://coffeecode.net/archives/231-File_MARC-0.6.0-now-offering-two-tasty-flavours-of-MARC-as-JSON-output.html [8] https://github.com/billdueber/marc4j_extra_reader_writers On 1/17/11 6:59 PM, "Galen Charlton" <gmcha...@gmail.com> wrote: Hi, I've pushed a branch called marc-json [1] implementing MARC-in-JSON support for MARC::Record. Besides hooking it up with MARC::Batch, at this point I'd like to know if there are any real-world cases where anybody has had occasion or desire to emit or handle JSONified MARC with the Perl libraries and has any opinion about the other two competing JSON MARC proposals [3] [4]. MARC-in-JSON support will be part of a feature release of MARC::Record, 2.1; if anybody has anything pending that they'd like in, please let me know. [1] http://marcpm.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=marcpm/marcpm;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/marc-json [2] http://dilettantes.code4lib.org/blog/2010/09/a-proposal-to-serialize-marc-in-json/ [3] http://www.oclc.org/developer/groups/marc-json-format-specification [4] http://robotlibrarian.billdueber.com/marc-hash-a-proposed-format-for-jsonyamlwhatever-compatible-marc-records/ Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton gmcha...@gmail.com