How to cite this paper

Dunn, Mark. “Generating MARC records from BITS.” Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2024, Washington, DC, July 29 - August 2, 2024. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2024. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 29 (2024). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol29.Dunn01.

Balisage: The Markup Conference 2024
July 29 - August 2, 2024

Balisage Paper: Generating MARC records from BITS

Mark Dunn

Content Engineering Manager

Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2024 by the author. Used with permission.

Abstract

Balisage 2024 included a short-subject Open Microphone session, during which conference attendees were invited give 2-10 minute presentations on any topic relevant to the conference, including specification updates, new tool announcements, and demonstrations.

This presentation describes the MARC format for bibliographic metadata, and the opportunities and challenges of generating MARC records from BITS XML. Of particular note are the UTF-8 characters for various kinds of separator, required in MARC records but illegal in XML. The proposed solution involves creating a temporary record using XSLT and completing it with a Java wrapper that replaces placeholder characters with the correct delimiters.