In This Chapter:

• What happens on first run
• Configuring the MARCEngine
• Associating Files with MarcEdit
• Setting up MarcEdit’s Automatic Update
• Miscellaneous Settings
• Where are my configuration settings

Congratulations!  You’ve installed MarcEdit and now you are ready to start using the application.  But where do you start?  Like most applications, MarcEdit’s user interface has gone through extensive testing, but the application has enough tools and functions to make even seasoned MarcEdit users periodically confused.   So where does one start?  Well, if you are new to the application, it’s probably best to step back and talk about what happens when you first run the application because the decisions made at first run, significantly impacts how MarcEdit will interact with the data that it processes.  Understanding how these initial configuration settings shape a users interactions with the program can help a one gain a better understanding of how MarcEdit interacts with the data, as well as provides users the knowledge that they need to configure MarcEdit appropriately so that the application works for them, within their local environments.

What happens on First Run

One of the things that makes MarcEdit unique among many of the MARC processing tools and libraries is that MarcEdit is largely MARC agnostic.  Does this mean that MarcEdit was designed to deny or doubt the possibility of a universal MARC format?  No, but wouldn’t that be great?  No, what is meant by this is that MarcEdit does not presume a specific “flavor” or implementation of the MARC structure.  While librarians in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and many European nations will largely utilize a “flavor” of MARC known as MARC21, other countries utilize their own national implementations of the specification or utilize a largely failed attempt at creating a pseudo-universal MARC implementation known as UNIMARC.  The point being, there are a wide range of MARC format implementations found throughout the library community, and many more one off MARC implementations in libraries that are utilized to provide descriptions of events, patrons, etc. used primarily by public library integrated library systems.

[table] [attr style=”width:90px”], “At one point, there were over 30+ national implementations of the MARC format.  MarcEdit is able to process each of these flavors because each MARC implementation utilizes ISO 2709 to define the implementation of it’s record structure.”

[/table]

Traditionally, library application development that targeted MARC processing would choose a “flavor” of MARC to support.  This was done for many valid reasons, many of them related to the ability to build data validation into the tool set.  While MarcEdit does provide a separate validation engine, MarcEdit was designed from the beginning as a universal MARC processing utility, purposefully not targeting any one specific implementation of MARC, but rather, providing tools that could be utilized with any MARC “flavor”.  What’s more, by separating the MARC processing from validation, MarcEdit could provide a flexible validation engine that users could customize to support their own validation needs.

However, MarcEdit’s MARC agnosticism comes at a price, in order for the program to maintain the separation between implementation and structural format, users need to configure the application so that it understands what “flavor” of data is being processed.  This is primarily so MarcEdit knows what fields are titles, authors, main entries for the purpose of display and sorting, as well as providing information regarding characterset preferences and diacritic processing so that the MARCEngine can generate records with the desired character encoding.  All these configuration options are set when MarcEdit is run for the first time, you just may not have realized it.