Okay 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).
@anj if you feel the need for speed you could try the new mrrc here too, since it has similar helper methods and is python wrapped rust. Although it is still being tested...