BookMARC helps libraries, archives and academic institutions to meets their needs in advanced solutions for information processing.

BookMARC has acumulated experience in solutions involving XML, MARC, UNIMARC, EAD, EAC and TEI. Our work leverages Open Source technologies and community based development models to provide solutions with low cost of implementation and wide dissemination potential. BookMARC's mixed competencies in IT, Humanities and Library Science makes it an ideal partner in advanced applications in libraries and archives. Examples of the company's work in these areas:

LEADERS project and the George Orwell papers

BookMARC was selected by the School of Library, Archives and Information Science at University College London to implement a generic toolset that enables the creation of an online environment which integrates EAD finding aids and EAC authority records with TEI transcripts and digitised images of archival material suitable to a wide variety of archives. The LEADERS Toolkit was developed with the aid of a grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board.

The LEADERS toolkit is currently available through Sourceforge at http://leaders.sourceforge.net and BookMARC offers a set of support and consultancy services for the LEADERS community.

XML and bibliographic data

Since 2002 BookMARC has been working consistently on the impact of XML on bibliographic data processing. Our approach is based on a three tier model: Transport, Validation and Services, as explained in a paper to the IFLA general conference in 2002:

XML and bibliographic data: the TVS (Transport, Validation and Services) model , JOAQUIM DE CARVALHO (BookMARC/University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal) and MARIA INÊS CORDEIRO (Art Library, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal)

The TVS page provides examples of XML schema for the transport and validation of MARC records and examples of source code to consume bibliographic web services provided by BookMARC.

The article "Meta-information about MARC:an XML framework for validation, explanation and help systems", Library Hi Tech, 22(2), 2004, pp.131-137, expands on TVS and proposes a schema for meta-information about MARC that can express at a fairly comprehensive level the syntactic and semantic aspects of MARC formats in XML, including not only rules but also all texts and examples that are conveyed by MARC documentation. It can be thought of as an XML version of the MARC or UNIMARC manuals, for both machine and human usage. You can access the article from Emerald's website. A support page is available at http://www.bookmarc.pt/documentation/marcdoc.html.

XML version of the UNIMARC manual

In 2004 BookMARC created a prototype of a XML version of the UNIMARC manual along with software tools that used it for validation and explanation purposes. This project was commisiioned by ILFA's UNIMARC program, currently located at the National Library of Lisbon, Portugal. The purpose of this work is to provide the UNIMARC community with a formal representation of UNIMARC rules and associated vocabularies. The resulting product has wide application in validation routines and the construction of help systems for cataloguing modules. A presentation is available in pdf format here. The prototype is available at http://www.bookmarc.pt/unimarc.