Paul, I am sure other people have suggested this:
My personal inclination is to use the XML as the canonical representation,
and make sure that is always present and correct,together with a creation
date/time.
If iso2709 is needed, then make the translation, and then cache the
translation together
with its creation date/time.
That way you can always tell if the iso2709 is out of date, it will be
created only on demand.
I guess if you expected the z39.50 interface to be the most heavily used -
Is that possible?
- you could do the work the other way around.
Just my 2 cents,
Rick Silterra
At 03:31 PM 1/4/2006 +0100, Paul POULAIN wrote:
Hello all,
Koha v3 will definetly be utf-8 (+ use indexdata zebra as backend for
retrieving records + many other great features).
Most of the stuff for utf-8 seems to be working quite well :
* templates moved to utf-8 (http-equiv)
* translation strings moved to utf-8 (iconv)
* mySQL database (4.1) moved to utf-8 too (some tricks here...)
The last question I have is : how to handle MARC records ?
For instance, in cvs, we have 2 columns in DB, one with raw marc record
(iso2709, MARC::record->as_usmarc() ) and the other with the XML version
of the record (using MARC::File::XML). Some MARC datas (title, author,
publisher...) are duplicated in specific columns of the database to avoid
decoding a large record when just needing 1 or 2 infos !
I see at least 2 solutions to solve my problem, and would be happy with
some suggestions :
1- let raw record in MARC-8 and in iso2709, and encode values in utf8 when
needed (=when being shown). That seems a poor solution to me for 2 reasons :
- The encoding/decoding will have to be done many many times.
- iso2709 format is a poor, old and binary format.
2- get rid with iso2709, use only XML, that is utf-8 natively. I see one
problem with this : when the record has to be exported, the iso2709 must
be in MARC-8. Exports can be done rarely or often, in case the library has
an open z3950 server ! (in this cas, the record should be send in MARC-8
if I don't mind)
The second solution seems better to me, as we can do many things with XML,
more than with iso2709 !
The difficulty being to be sure that MARC::Record will handle them
correctly, as Koha makes *heavy use* of MARC::Record.
(You may think that using MARC::Record is poor if datas are stored in XML
! you are right there. But :
- you can consider MARC as a 3 level only XML
- you can move from MARC to XML and from XML to MARC, so that could be a
1st step to go 100% XML
- did I say Koha makes heavy use of MARC::Record ? Thus removing it is
really a problem !
)
Le me know what you think, I continue to investigate.
--
Paul POULAIN
Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres
responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)
******************************
Enrico Silterra
Meta Data Engineer
107-E Olin Library
Cornell University
Ithaca NY 14853
Voice: 607-255-6851
Fax: 607-255-6110
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.library.cornell.edu/cts/
******************************
