In the past couple of days, two people have written me email essentially saying: "Dan, this File_MARC library sounds great - but I can't figure out how to create a record from scratch with it! Can you please help me? Yes, when you're dealing with MARC, you'll quickly get all weepy and get help from anyone you can.

His example code is pretty simple - load the PEAR package into the script, create the record object and start adding fields to it. He shows various output methods ("pretty print", writing the raw data to a file, etc.) and the output to various other data structures like JSON and XML.

Okay, I've been working on this project (let's call it PEAR_MARC, although it's not an official PEAR project yet) in my spare moments over the past month or two. It's a new PHP package for working with MARC records. The package tries to follow the PEAR project standards (coding, documentation, error handlers, etc) in the hopes that, when I put a proposal forward, it will be accepted as a true PEAR package. For now, I'm most interested in getting feedback from coders for libraries on the usability of the API that I've designed -- is it easy enough to use and does it offer the functionality that you require for your day-to-day work?

He talks about the development of the package (from the php-marc package) and some of the differences between the two. Among them are:

• System requirements
• Functionality (different means to the same end)
• Error handling
• Tests (unit testing files included)