Month: April 2009

After a medium-sized discussion on #code4lib, we’ve collectively decided that…well, ok, no one really cares all that much, but a few people weighed in. The new format is: A list of arrays. If it’s got two elements, it’s a control field; if it’s got four, it’s a data field. SO….it’s like this now. { “type” : “marc-hash”, “version” : [1, 0], “leader” : “leader string” “fields” : [ [“001”, “001 value”] [“002”, “002 value”] [“010″, ” “, ” “, [ [“a”, “68009499”] ] ], [“035″, ” “, ” “, [ [“a”, “(RLIN)MIUG0000733-B”] ], ], [“035″, ” “, ” “, […

In my first shot at MARC-in-JSON, which I appropriately (and prematurely) named MARC-JSON, I made a point of losing round-tripability (to and from MARC) in order to end up with a nice, easy-to-work-with data structure based mostly on hashes. “Who really cares what order the subfields come in?” I asked myself. Well, of course, it turns out some people do. Some even care about the order of the tags. “Only in the 500s…usually” I was told today. All my lovely dreams of using easy-to-access hashes up in so much smoke. So…I’m suggesting we try something a little simpler. Something so…