Well, there's always a time in which you find some really, really obscure shit in your life and you wonder why or how you dropped into this place where paths seem very... should I say, fucking weird?
Couple of years ago I was studying, well I still am, at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of UABC and came to find this really weird database the Institute for Historical Investigations has, never heard of it, or the format, UNESCO was behind it, that's it, not much to do there. Digging up more info into this it turns out that the thing does not work on anything above Windows XP, furthermore this was made for MS-DOS back in the day and has some awkward limitations that cannot be fixed in any way or form, did I mention UNESCO dropped support for it a long time ago and this thing is incompatible with other formats?
What this means in the long run is that you are stuck with something that cannot be upgraded, modified or easily transition to something that has web capabilities, oh yeah, since this was made way back in the day there was no way to get this on the internet without downloading and working with some obscure libraries.
So I volunteered to fix this and make something at least in PHP to have something that could be easily worked with, the problem remains though on how to get this out.
Round 0: Facing thy enemy without knowing anything about it
Does it work: In some lucky instances probably but not this one, after looking around for documentation and trying to do this directly through Python and some Linux commands I noted that this was a stupid thing to do as I had little to no understanding of ISO2709 or MARC for that matter.
Round 1: OpenISIS/Malete
Does it work: Yes and no? For the life of me I could not figure or understand how to get this to work, I even managed to find the executable binary file for Linux but it does not work, it simply will not work without going apeshit about the extensions not being in lowercase and missing some of the files. To top it off this is no longer supported by the developer, unfortunate.
Round 2: isis2json
Does it work: Nope, and this looked like the most viable candidate but I could simply not work out the kinks and requirements, I followed everything that was in the instructions but apparently I'm doing something wrong or it simply is not working anymore since it was done 6 years ago.
Round 3: Isis2XML
Does it work: I don't know about this one, I did not get the chance to try it out since this is for Windows and I could not be bothered to get as virtual machine running with Windows XP in order to test it. May work on other versions, I won't lie, but again I do not have the time to bother with it.
Round 4: CDS/ISIS PHP
Does it work: Nope, could not even figure out what to do with it, you get a couple of files to include somewhere but from what I understand this is part or became part of OpenISIS.
Round 5: Biblio-Isis-0.24
Does it work: Surprisingly yes, had to figure out how to install the module after downloading and uncompressing it (first time using PERL) and afterwards get the initial script to work, I was really surprised when I managed to pipe everything out to a file in which everything came out, well, there is the concern that some characters are not showing up but this can be fixed later, the only problem left for me right now is to figure out a way to get everything moved around in such a way that it can be easily imported to MariaDB or anything else.
http://search.cpan.org/~dpavlin/Biblio-Isis-0.24/lib/Biblio/Isis.pm <- Link to the savior of the day.
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