CompuServe Messages

Frank, I understand what you said about the complexity of the MARC format, but would full text necessarily be any better? Let's take the movie database as an example. Suppose I want to search for movies by name of an actor (e.g. William Boyd) or by name of a character in the story (e.g. Hopalong Cassidy). In a full text database you could get a lot of false drops if you cannot limit the search to a specific field. For example if we search for (John & Wayne) we could retrieve retrieve a movie staring Jill St. John and Wayne Newton, if they ever appeared in the same movie. Maybe the way to solve this problem is to use SGML to delimit the various components of the full text record. What do you think? Phil