An XML representation of the UNIMARC manual : a working prototype

The UNIMARC manual defines a standard for the formal representation of bibliographic information. For that purpose the UNIMARC manual contains different types of information: structural rules stating that records are composed of a leader, a set of control fields and a set of data fields, with certain syntactic characteristics; content rules, defining required fields and acceptable values for various components of the record; and, finally, examples, explanatory notes, and cross references to other points of the manual. Much of this information must find its way into computer systems where it will be used to validate records, produce indexes, adequately format records for display and, in some cases, provide human-readable help. Providing the UNIMARC manual in XML greatly simplifies the full implementation of the format in computer systems. Our goal was to produce a formal representation of the UNIMARC format so that the standard could be incorporated in software systems in a transparent way. The outcome is an XML representation of the UNIMARC manual, which can be processed automatically by applications that need to enforce the format rules, provide help information or vocabularies. We developed a scheme for the UNIMARC manual and a set of software tools that demonstrate its usage.