In my last post I explained the basics of how we will be handling MARC records as XML. To recap, we will store our bibliographic record as MARC21slim XML documents. This format is recommended and maintained by the Library of Congress, so we feel confident using it. Now we just need to morph our binary records into XML! (WARNING: What follows is pretty technical, so hang on tight.)
[Read more…] about A Tale of Two Encodings
Staff Client Themes and Skins
Previously, we mentioned CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and how it allows us to separate presentation from content in our Mozilla-based applications. We have a few screenshots to demonstrate this. Let’s start with some drastic examples:
Messaging
I’d like to share a word on communication. We’ve decided to start with Jabber (www.jabber.org) as the communication layer between the various components. Jabber is great because it can be as simple as you want while allowing for practically limitless expansion. Given the open nature of Jabber, for example, we could write our own server components that ‘plug in’ to the jabber server and perform additional tasks on messages besides simply routing them through the messaging network.