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 <t...@librarything.com> 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 Problemsâ„¢ ;-)
Thanks for the input!
-Nate
