Monthly Archives: April 2009

MARC-HASH: The saga continues (now with even less structure)

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" [...]

MARC-HASH control field, now with less structure

Why do I ever, ever think that MARC might not rely on order? I don’t know.

In any case, control fields will now be just an array of duples:

control: [   ['001', 'value of the 001'],   ['006', 'value of the 006']   ['006', 'another 006'] }

MARC-Hash: a proposed format for JSON/YAML/Whatever-compatible MARC records

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 [...]