In his book, Using XML, Kwong Bor Ng—associate professor at the School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College, City University of New York—states that “Current trends suggest that XML use, already ubiquitous, will continue to expand, making XML knowledge one of today's most important technical skills for librarians” (p. xiii). And, in today's technology-driven environment, it is easy to see that extensible markup language (XML) could become the standard for describing data, storing data in bibliographic records, and sending data through the web. Using XML takes the reader through all the above applications, using examples and exercises.
What sets this manual apart from other general introductory texts is the attention to XML use as it relates to libraries. From basic to advanced lessons, Ng teaches XML principles with step-by-step exercises throughout the book. Because XML is new (the first version became a World Wide Web Consortium [W3C] recommendation in 1998, the latest version 1.1 in 2004), technical services librarians, metadata librarians, system librarians, and web editors would probably benefit from having this text available. And for those of us who are not these types of professionals? With a basic understanding of markup language, this book can provide any librarian a beginning foundation to XML use and practice.
The book is divided into four parts. Part I, “Introducing XML,” tells the developmental history of XML, as well as some of the primary applications for its use in libraries. These chapters have readers take a closer look at their own library databases and find information already available in XML format (i.e., PubMed citations). Part II, “Basic XML Techniques,” contains explanations and exercises for creating, organizing, and processing XML documents. An introduction to viewing XML documents using cascading style sheets (CSS) is also provided. Part III, “Intermediate XML Techniques,” uses exercises to explain document type declaration (DTD), which is used to define the structure of an XML document. Part IV, “Advanced XML Techniques,” completes the book with explanation of and exercises in the use of schema language and extensible style sheet language.
The appendixes offer additional reference in terms of actual applications. Appendix 1 discusses a simplified version of the MARC DTD, created by the Library of Congress. The MARC21 Slim Schema, developed to support all five of the MARC formats (bibliographic, authority, holdings, classification, and community information), is broken down and explained by fragments in Appendix 2. Appendixes 3 and 4 consist of a glossary of basic XML terms and a table of numeric references representing some common special characters.
This book comes with a companion CD-ROM for readers to check their work. But there are no “trouble-shooting” pages to guide the reader when error messages occur or when the exercises do not display properly on the screen. The companion CD does contain additional references, however, with all the W3C recommendations for XML, website links to the technical reports, CSS specifications, and further explanation in the use of XML schema.
The book is well organized, from simple to complex. If concepts are not clearly understood, the reader is directed to reread preceding concepts before moving on to the next exercise or to find explanations later in the book. The author has listed helpful websites, as well as references to files on the CD in the context of each chapter for further review of the concept being explained. The chapter exercises build on one another, so the same sample information used in creating the files is a common thread throughout the book. However, because each chapter's exercises and files build from the one before it, the reader can sometimes get confused by the copying, saving, and similarity of filenames.
The expectation for a How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians is a tool with actual, already proven recommendations and/or instructions for completing the topic with a basic understanding of the application. Using XML provides “a fundamental education in XML-based resource description and bibliographic management” (p. xi) with real world application.