[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Serving pure MODS records

[Liam Whalen]

I mentioned in the following Launhpad discussion (https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1235497/) that serving a pure MODS record would be desirable.

My concern here is for someone outside of the Evergreen community that wants to use information contained in a modified MODS document via an automated tool.

If the tool uses validation, it may reject any document that does not conform to the standard.

This could result in someone deciding not to expand upon Evergreen data.

I have not looked at the additions to the MODS schema in Evergreen, so if all it does is add leaf nodes to a document, then parsing around these would probably happen without any change to an automated tool.

But, if validation is used first to decide if the tool should proceed, the modifications might prevent the data from being used.

From the discussion on Launchpad, it sounds like moving away from the modifications to MODS would be time consuming.

So, perhaps the best option is to create a translation that will remove the modifications and return these documents to pure MODS?

With something like this in place, API's that offer the current documents could offer both the documents as they exist and standard MODS versions as well.

Ideally, we could stick with pure MODS altogether and derive needed values via code.  I say ideally because if we want to maintain a modified version of the schema, it would be beneficial to publish the schema's definition somewhere, so it can be used by others.

This entails organizing modifications to the schema and perhaps too much extra work considering the vast amount of stuff the community is already doing.

Liam