So, the ISO2709 character limit is not
actually an issue at all, then.
Well, actually, it is in koha.
Since Koha gets iso2709 from a zebra search.
If it Koha would take marcxml, it would be even slower to get search
results with the Search.pm as it stands now... And let me know if you
know a librarian who would like that.
MARCXML parsing is slow because MARC::File::XML uses a SAX parser to do
the job and do some 'magic' encoding-decoding to-from MARC8--Galen
could correct me if I'm wrong. But since records stored into Koha are
cleanly UTF-8 encoded, are well formed XML and respect a minimalist
schema, we could parse them much more quickly directly in Perl. I've
done some experimentation. It works easily. This code could be ported
in five minutes:
http://tinyurl.com/3x3d6b9
--
Frédéric