Since 1999, when I first started working on MarcEdit, the application has gone through two complete rewrites, multiple installers, multiple platforms, and a number of different interface designs. Through it all, the program has shifted and adapted to support the largely heterogeneous nature of library metadata. While I’m certain most people skimming this text likely are interested in specific topics like editing records, harvesting XML metadata, working with delimited data, etc., etc. — I think that it is important to take a step back and introduce folks to the program. I’ve been working on it for a long time, it has a history, and it’s a history that I’d like to share.
In this first section, I will take a step back and look at how MarcEdit has evolved over the years and why Kyle Banerjee played such an important part in the program’s early development. From there, we’ll take a high level view of the application, discussing how to get started, what happens when you start up the application, editing your first MARC Record, and how you can get help. My intention is that this first book will lay the ground work for later discussions and help to provide to users some context around some of the decisions the application makes when working with metadata records. Let’s begin.
Chapters:
- Chapter 1: Getting to Know MarcEdit
- Chapter 2: Getting Started
- Chapter 3: Understanding the MarcEdit Preferences
- Chapter 4: Editing my First Set of Records
- Chapter 5: Help!