RSS to MARC

There is a great post over at Catalogablog that talks about someone talking about doing transformation from RSS into MARC. With sites like LII, Resource Shelf and others doing a good job of making metadata about new Internet resources available (and providing RSS feeds), this may be a viable solution to the adding Internet links to the library catalog with minimal effort. That is if you believe that adding Internet sites to the catalog is a worthwhile endeavor.

The reason I mention this post is not because I am keen on adding sites to the library catalog, but rather because this idea shows off the power of XML. If you have something in one XML metadata schema you can easily transform it into another metadata schema. The Library of Congress has done a great job of making this easy for people to transform records in XML from one metadata schema to another. They provide a ton of different transforms on their site which means you don’t even have to know how to write your own XSLT to get the job done. All of this makes metadata much more portable. The biggest limitation is having all the information to fill the required fields. Without this a transformation won’t do you any good. Still, as more data is passed about using XML, the possibilities for libraries to gather data from other sources and transform that data into library metadata standards grows.