Generating MARC records from BITS

Balisage 2024 included a short-subject “Open Microphone” session, during which conference attendees were invited give 2-10 minute presentations on any topic relevant to the conference, including specification updates, new tool announcements, and demonstrations. This presentation describes the MARC format for bibliographic metadata, and the opportunities and challenges of generating MARC records from BITS XML. Of particular note are the UTF-8 characters for various kinds of separator, required in MARC records but illegal in XML. The proposed solution involves creating a temporary record using XSLT and completing it with a Java wrapper that replaces placeholder characters with the correct delimiters.