Quoting "J. McRee Elrod" <[email protected]>:
Now that we have discovered there are MARC fields for most of the desired ONIX data, we may well be producing enriched MARC XML as opposed to ONIX.
I feel like I missed part of this conversation, so I don't know what the "desired ONIX data" is, or who desires it. However, MARC21 and ONIX are VERY DIFFERENT metadata sets. There is some overlap, but both have many fields that aren't included in the other. That is as it should be, because the publishers and libraries are doing different things with their metadata. For example, the publishers are using it to fill in all of the pricing information that retailers need (which is more complex than it seems on the surface). They also include marketing material. They don't have a place for most of the MARC21 notes field, there isn't a place for conference as "main entry," etc. etc. These are library-only practices.
We have been told that OCLC has a MARC to ONIX conversion program, but it is not freely available.
As I understand it, OCLC has a kind of "universal format" that can allow MARC and ONIX records to exchange data elements. But it can't fully fill in an ONIX record from MARC since MARC doesn't have any of the ONIX retail/marketing fields. And when I was working with some ebooks folks, they were sending ONIX records to OCLC but OCLC had to actually re-catalog the ebooks to put them in the database.
The bottom line is that ONIX and MARC are applies and oranges, but there is work being done to coordinate between them in those elements that we have in common. Part of the impetus for moving toward standardizing the definition of data elements (outside of any particular record format) is that these two formats could actually *share* some data elements. That's what has been done with the carriers, etc., and it's a great step forward. If we could do the same for some other data elements (names, titles, identifiers) we'd be much more able to move those data elements through the supply chain, rather than re-inventing them at each step. The OCLC work relating to ONIX (and led by Renee Register) is going in this direction, and I think it is very interesting (although I, too, wish more could be shared from OCLC).
Things are changing by the hour!
That's definitely the case! kc -- Karen Coyle [email protected] http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet
