Exercise 3.5 -- XML

Prior to this week's exercise, I had heard of XML, but did not realise its relevance to libraries. Unlike HTML, which Bosak and Bray (1999) likened to a fax machine, XML focuses on data's meaning as opposed to its presentation (TEI, 2004). As an extensible language, authors of XML documents can write their own DTD or use an existing DTD such as Dublin Core to define task-specific elements and attributes, describing data with as much semantic precision as necessary. XML was designed to be interoperable, so any application with access to the DTD specified in an XML file can make sense of it. Information can be exchanged between different applications without loss of meaning. These factors facilitate the retrieval of data.

In academic libraries, XML has been used to transfer data between institutional repositories (Bishop, 2007). Special Collections staff at Leeds University Library are receiving training in cataloguing manuscripts using the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) DTD for inclusion into the library's digital repository. Stanford University's Medlane Project created XMLMARC to convert MARC catalogue records into XML and facilitate their manipulation.

For this week's exercise, I used XML to solve the problem of collecting information about our missing library items, which are currently recorded on manually sorted paper slips. This would allow information to be passed between customer service staff, academic librarians, and collection management services. The links below show my DTD and XML file, which were checked for validity and well-formedness using validome.org's XML validator.

http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~abgy261/missinglist.dtd
http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~abgy261/missinglist.xml

Bosak and Bray (1999) envisaged, "...millions of XML documents pulsing around the Internet," yet a cursory look at the Internet shows this is not yet the case. To best convert information into knowledge we must imbue digital information we create with semantic meaning.