In this Chapter:

• Where it all started
• MarcEdit through the years
• Looking to the future

Where it all started

I would like to be able to say that the development and release of MarcEdit was part of a grand master plan to equip technical services librarians with the tools necessary to manipulate their institution’s metadata.  That would be a good story, but it isn’t mine.  Like many undergraduate students at the University of Oregon, I held a work-study position in the university library system, specifically the Maps and Aerial Photography (MAP) Library.  It was there that I was first introduced to concepts like MARC, OCLC, and AACR2.  While at the University of Oregon, the MAP Library functioned more as a departmental library for the Geography Department — it was part of the library system, but the close ties to the department and the distance from the main library allowed the Library and its staff to work largely independent of the main library system. It was during my tenure at the MAP Library that then Head of the MAP Library, Peter Stark, began instructing me on historical cartographic cataloging.  For years, Mr. Stark was cataloging the historical cartographic collections into the catalog, but OCLC’s Passport was a pain point, and we were interesting in knowing if there was a better way.

While I had no background in libraries, I did come to the MAP Library with a background in computers.  At the time, working on a cataloging record required using OCLC’s Passport for Windows.  This program looked like a telnet screen, and essentially functioned as a specialized telnet client.  We’d toss some information into this telnet program and out would come a neatly formatted binary file that we would magically load into the Library’s Integrated Library System (ILS).  I’ve always liked to know how things worked, and Passport for Windows was no exception.  I started spending time working to understand the process.  The resulting output was a set of tools that would allow me to build reports of MARC records so I could better understand what information was embedded in a record.  It certainly wasn’t much, but this work began a life-long exploration of how library metadata moves and interacts with other systems, and served as the precursor to MarcEdit’s initial coding libraries.

After graduating from the University of Oregon, I took a cataloging position at Oregon State University (OREStateU).  This would be the first time that I worked with other catalogers in a formal technical services environment.  It was also the first time I found out how wonderfully nuts folks in technical services can be.  Shortly after starting at OREStateU Libraries, the Technical Services Department met to discuss it’s next big project. OREStateU Libraries had been utilizing a process to change SuDoc numbers into the Library of Congress Classification system and by and large, this process was working reliably.  But like all automated processes, there had been exceptions, and over a period of time those exceptions had grown into a problem representing nearly 100,000 records given incorrect classifications.  On the tables were reams and reams of printed out spreadsheets, each containing the incorrect and correct classification numbers.  The project was presented as a 3-5 year effort and would involve everyone taking a range of records and making manual changes.  Given the staff in the Libraries, it worked out to ~15,000 records per person.

I, on the other hand, was starting to rethink my decision of working in libraries.