MARC standards

# EAD and MARC sitting in a tree: D-R-U-P-A-L Mark Matienzo Yale University Library (ex-New York Public Library)
# background: migration/redeployment
# launched new site January 6: www.nypl.org
# components: Drupal, XSLT, Solr, Shrew
# browse/search/view: http://www.nypl.org/find-archival-materials
# drupal-shrew: liberating yr data from III http://github.com/anarchivist/drupal-shrew
# III into Drupal...
# ...to the rest of the world

MarcXimiL is a free, flexible, fully standards-compliant and efficient bibliographic similarity analysis framework.

Similarity analyses may be set up at all levels of the process, run in batch or through the API. Options include:

* the order of comparisons between and within collections
* for each field, the selection of a parsing function
* for each field, the selection of a comparison function amongst a wide selection: vectorial (Dice, Jaccard, Salton's cosine), probabilistic (OKAPI BM25), Levenshtein based, Shingling, Authors, Date, and others.
* the global record similarity strategy (integration of fields similarities)
* the output format (XML, spreadsheet)
* thresholds at different levels

A description of a method for matching bibliographic records when the only common identifiers are strings that are not exact matches.

I really like the idea of using XSLT to manipulate MARC data -- it's not a perfect translation language, to be sure, but it's a standard, which means it gives us a shared language. We can share tricks, patterns, and entire stylesheets for different purposes, from data conversion to display formatting, and high-performance XSLT processors can be embedded into just about any kind of software platform. The LoC makes a few nice, reusable stylesheets available for MARCXML work -- it would be nice to see something like that evolve into a public repository of stylesheets.