The MARC Tools component of MarcEdit is the oldest part of the application. When the MarcEdit user interface was first developed and made available publicly, the primary scope of the application was to provide a functional equivalent to the U.S. Library of Congress’s MARCBreakr/MARCMakr that worked within the current MS Windows environment. Early on, the MARC Tools component focused on the process of providing a workflow for users looking to “make” and “break” MARC records into formats that could be either edited in MarcEdit or loaded into an external system.
Over time, the process of working with MARC data has grown increasingly more difficult. MARC has always been coded using different “flavors”, but the shifting between different character encodings, and the introduction of XML-based metadata schemas have added new complications in how MARC processing tools interact with MARC data. As MarcEdit has evolved, the MARC Tools component has evolved as well to include functionality for handling diverse character encodings, XML schemas, and MARC record anomalies.
In this Book, I will describe the MARCEngine, how MarcEdit works with Character Encodings, Batch Processing folders of records, and some of the ancillary tools that allow users to slice, dice, and join record sets together. Additionally, I will describe how MarcEdit works with XML data — specifically, the process of “teaching” MarcEdit specific metadata translations and how you can share those translations with the larger MarcEdit community.
Chapters
- Chapter 1: Getting to know the MARC Tools and the MARCEngine
- Chapter 2: Dealing with Character encodings in MarcEdit
- Chapter 3: Slice, Dice, and Join your Records Again
- Chapter 4: Merging MARC Data Sets
- Chapter 5: Batch Processing Data
- Chapter 6: Working with XML Data