Syntax of bibliographic part of OPAC record

Issue raised by: Lee Newman 2 May 1996

How does an origin specify the syntax for the bibliographicRecord portion of the OPAC record? Is it just assumed if you want the OPAC record, you want the bib record part in MARC format? If so, should there be a comment to that effect?

When OPAC was developed there was a tacit assumption that although MARC would be used primarily, it would not be used exclusively, and it was felt that any such comment would not be appropriate. If a static syntax is to agreed upon, it would be the domain of a profile, not the standard.

For version 2, you can define an element set name which assigns a specific syntax to the bibliographic part. This is not useful to support more than a few syntaxes, because you have to assign a different element set name for each.

For version 3, you would define a schema (a schema for use with OPAC as the enveloping syntax, as opposed to GRS-1) and then use an element specification. The element specification would likely not be eSpec-1 (which was developed for use with GRS-1), but rather an element specification analogous to eSpec-1 developed for OPAC.