Subject: [CODE4LIB] Printed catalogs

From: Jared Camins <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2009 13:09:40 -0500

Dear CODE4LIB,

I think this sort of question would fall under the purview of this list, but
if there's a better forum for my question, please let me know. I am
cataloging a special collection in MARC (to take advantage of LC copy
cataloging, primarily), but at the end of the project I will be producing a
printed catalog for the owner of the collection. My plan is to use an XSLT
stylesheet to produce the catalog from MARCXML. I already threw together a
stylesheet to produce a brief HTML bibliography of the collection, so I am
confident that this plan would work. We would probably use LaTeX rather than
HTML for output for the final catalog, since that would make the final
printing easier, not to mention index generation.

My question is, has anyone done something like this? Any lessons learned the
hard way, stylesheets I could model ours on, or any other advice?

Thanks in advance for all your help.

Regards,
Jared Camins-Esakov

P.S. I should mention that I am not entirely wed to the idea of using an
XSLT stylesheet. It seems like the path of least resistance, but if anyone
could suggest a better tool, I would be very interested to learn about it. I
do have a background in programming, so I would be comfortable using
C/Perl/whatever, if there were a good reason to do so.

-- 
Jared Camins-Esakov
Freelance bibliographer and archivist
(cell) +1 (917) 880-7649
(e-mail)  [email-masked]
(web) http://www.jaredcamins.com/

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From: Andrew Nagy <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2009 13:47:29 -0500

If you do choose to use XSLT, the Library of Congress has a bunch of XSLTs
for MARCXML which will save a tremendous amount of time for you.

http://www.loc.gov/standards/marcxml/xslt/

Andrew