MARC record conversion: a generalised approach1
The problem of different bibliographic catalogue encodings presents a serious obstacle hampering international inter-library communications and worldwide library search. This paper presents a utility for manipulating hierarchically organised data, which was built to perform MARC record conversion. Data representation and conversion language are described in detail. Existing standards for bibliographic record representation are considered and requirements for their conversion are gathered. The impact of MARC processing requirements on the designed generic conversion language is assessed. Character set conversions, accompanying the record translation procedure, are not discussed in this paper.
marc conversion library bibliographic record schema