Page 94 - Building Digital Libraries

General-Purpose Technologies Useful for Digital Repositories

digital repository will eventually be the storehouse for many important
documents and research. As such, an organization must ensure that its
repository will make the organization’s metadata available to it in whatever
format that it might need, both for the present and the future.

Why Use XML-Based Metadata

A common question that comes up many times during the planning stages
of many digital projects is: why should we utilize XML-based schemas at all
for bibliographic description? Libraries have seemed to get along just fine
with MARC for the last fifty years—why the sudden change? Why should
an organization adopt a new way of doing bibliographic description when
no one sees a problem with the current one? It’s a fair question and one
that an organization needs to be prepared to answer. This is especially true
for organizations that may have no other projects utilizing a non-MARC
markup format. From the perspective of building a digital repository, here
are five reasons to support such a transition:

XML Is Human-Readable

One of the primary benefits associated with XML is that the generated
metadata is human-readable. This is very different from binary formats like
PDF, MS Word, or even MARC21, which do not allow for easy inspection of
data. Of course, many XML records are never meant to be natively read by
an individual without the help of an XML reader—but this characteristic of
XML makes data (1) more transparent, (2) makes the data less susceptible
to data corruption, and (3) reduces the likelihood of data lockup.
1. Data transparency provides a number of immediate ben-
efits. Within a closed binary system, the actual document
schema, or the rules that give the document meaning,
are hidden from the user. Within an XML-based meta-
data system, the document schema is always readily
available. Users can inspect the data markup as well as
any DTDs (document type definitions) or namespace
files that are defined within the document schema. This
is a powerful aspect of XML in that it opens one’s data,
making it easier for organizations or individuals to reuse
the metadata within other systems. As noted, this is very
different from other binary data formats—including
MARC. Binary data formats, like MARC, are computer-
generated formats, meaning that while they can be read
with some difficulty by humans, they are not human-
readable. Take the MARC record below:

79