marc-bibframe-viewer

Web tool for viewing a MARC record alongside its BIBFRAME conversion.

This was a personal project to learn more about Rust and BIBFRAME and also to investigate AI assisted learning strategies.

Approach

By creating a byte-offset index beforehand using a CLI, API may find a record from large MARCXML files in O(1) with reasonable memory requirements. This combined with spawning a subprocess for xsltproc allows API handler to provide a performant per record conversion without needing a separate triple store.

The conversion rules are from LoC's marc2bibframe2 which is included as a third-party submodule to this repository.

Layout

Cargo.toml                    # virtual workspace
crates/bf-viewer-core/        # lib - logic
crates/bf-viewer-cli/         # bin - index building
crates/bf-viewer-api/         # bin - http server
frontend/                     # lightweight Astro components
third_party/                  # third-party submodules

Each crate and the frontend has its own README.

Setting development environment

Requires xsltproc on PATH. Unix only as positional reads utilize std::os::unix::fs::FileExt.

1. Initialize third-party git submodules by using: git submodule update --init --recursive
2. Build release version of CLI: cargo build --release -p bf-viewer-cli
3. Build the index for source XML: ./target/release/bf-viewer-cli data/catalog.xml data/index.tsv
4. Setup .env file for API. See example at .env.example (or just rename to .env).
5. (Optional) if you started API development server elsewhere than port 8080, fix frontend/astro.config.mjs server proxy appropriately
6. Start API in shell #1: cargo run -p bf-viewer-api
7. Start UI in shell #2: cd frontend && npm i && npm run dev
8. Browse to localhost:4321

Use of AI disclosure

This learning project was developed with the help of Claude (chat mode available at claude.ai). The code creation loop was as follows:

1. Author prompted Claude on what feature was wanted to be achieved
2. Claude proposed a solution, which the author reviewed and refined
3. Claude wrote initial code, which the author then reviewed and edited

License

The source code found in this repository is licensed under MIT license.

Please note that a binary release would most probably require additional steps and that submodules and spawned subprocesses carry their own respective licenses.