Andy JacksonOkay DigiPresHiveMind, I have a question... I have a big pile of MARC XML. I don't know MARC, so unlike the experts I've worked with, I can't expand all these letters and codes in my head! Is there a library that will do some basic expansion of MARC into something I can understand? I realise this might be lossy, but some kind of Dublin Core or plain-old-CSV projection would be helpful!
Writing that made me realised XSLT exists, and I managed to find https://www.loc.gov/standards/marcxml/xslt/MARC21slim2RDFDC.xsl but not really any official looking documentation about it?
Ah, okay, DC in RDF. Now I have two problems... ;-) https://www.loc.gov/standards/marcxml/
(there is also some METS for every MARC...)
Looking at pymarc, it seems like this'll do: "A pymarc.Record object has a few handy properties like title for getting at bits of a bibliographic record, others include: author, isbn, subjects, location, notes, physicaldescription, publisher, pubyear." (It goes on to warn that this is missing a lot of detail, but I can live with that for this purpose).
ink
raffaele@anj well, I struggled many times doing this and none of the libraries I have used https://github.com/knakk/kbp https://github.com/miku/marc21 does a code translation to a human vocabulary.
The best resource I use to understand those codes is this old unmaintained wiki http://unimarc-it.wikidot.com/ (italian only, unkown maintainer)
The best resource I use to understand those codes is this old unmaintained wiki http://unimarc-it.wikidot.com/ (italian only, unkown maintainer)
Greg Wiedeman@anj as a fellow non-MARC understander, this thread is cursed 😱
James Truitt (he/him)@anj As someone who also doesn't do MARC but is fresh off a pair of library school metadata classes—if you can find something to convert it to MODS, it will be fairly readable, and I believe such converters exist.
Ruth [☕️ 👩🏻💻📚✍🏻🧵🪡🍵]@linguistory @anj I would also recommend MarcEdit for transformations and also just for looking at files if you want to start to see patterns. You can also export a subset of fields into a tab-separated value, which I find extremely helpful.
There are also some built-in transforms.
If you want reference, I recc: https://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/index.html
Looking at other stuff in the thread pymarc's labeled fields are definitely helpful for just getting some basics out of each, which MarcEdit doesn't support.