Page 59 - DLIS405_INFORMATION_STORAGE_AND_RETRIEVAL

Information Storage and Retrieval

Notes MARC 21 was designed to redefine the original MARC record format for the 21st century and to
make it more accessible to the international community. MARC 21 has formats for the following
five types of data: Bibliographic Format, Authority Format, Holdings Format, Community Format,
and Classification Data Format. Currently MARC 21 has been implemented successfully by The
British Library, the European Institutions and the major library institutions in the United States,
and Canada.
MARC 21 allows the use of two character sets, either MARC-8 or Unicode encoded as UTF-8. MARC-
8 is based on ISO 2022 and allows the use of Hebrew, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, and East Asian scripts.
MARC 21 in UTF-8 format allows all the languages supported by Unicode.

MARC XML

MARC XML is an XML schema based on the fairly common MARC 21 standards.

MARC XML was developed by the US Library of Congress and adopted by it
and others as a means of easy sharing of, and networked access to, bibliographic
information.
Being easy to parse by various systems allows it to be used as an aggregation format, as it is in
software packages such as MetaLib, though that package merges it into a wider DTD specification.
The MARC XML primary design goals included:
• Simplicity of the schema
• Flexibility and extensibility
• Lossless and reversible conversion from MARC
• Data presentation through XML style sheets
• MARC records updates and data conversions through XML transformations
• Existence of validation tools.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. MARC is an acronym, used in the field of library science that stands for ...... .
2. MARC defines a bibliographic data format that was developed by ...... at the library of
congress beginning in the 1960’s.
3. MARC records are composed of three elements: ...... , ...... and ...... .
4. MARC 21 has formats for the following five types of data: Bibliographic Format, Authority
Format, Holdings Format, ...... and ...... .
5. MARC 21 in ...... format allows all the languages supported by unicode.

5.2 Common Communication Format

The Unesco Common Communication Format (CCF) is described in the context of other exchange
formats. A definition is given of ‘exchange format’, and the CCF is compared against this definition.
The history of its development is outlined and its major technical features are summarized. Examples

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