Hi, I’m Terry and I’m an accidental librarian.  Are you?  It’s odd for me looking over my career, at its many ebbs and flows, and realize how much of my future work would spring up from a happy accident, some good timing, and a few colleagues willing to believe in me when they had no good reason to.  But isn’t that how it always starts?  I look back now, and see how fortunate I have been to find a profession and community that challenges me intellectually and offers daily opportunities for growth and failure.  To find institutions and colleagues that share my curiosity for how things work, and are willing to put up with my need to pull everything apart so I can learn how to put it back together again.  Libraries are always changing, and over the years, I’ve tried to take the things that I’ve learned and adapt them to MarcEdit, to enable the program to evolve to meet the future needs of metadata experts working to make information available for the next generation.

MarcEdit is a metadata editor: a suite of tools designed around the specific types of metadata currently in use by libraries.  In that way, the name, MarcEdit, has become a bit of a misnomer. While creating, editing, and transforming data into and out of the MARC[ref]MARC Standards, http://loc.gov/marc[/ref] format is still at the core of the application, the tool has grown to include the capacity to create, edit, and transform much of the non-MARC metadata used by libraries.  MarcEdit was one of the first tools of its kind to provide support for translating data between FGDC[ref]Federal Geographic Data Committee, http://www.fgdc.gov/[/ref], MODS[ref]Metadata Object Description Schema, http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/[/ref], EAD[ref]Encoded Archival Description, http://www.loc.gov/ead/[/ref], MARC21XML[ref]MARC21 XML Schema, http://www.loc.gov/standards/marcxml[/ref], Dublin Core[ref]Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, http://dublincore.org/[/ref]…and a variety of other metadata standards being used locally by vendors and related communities.

The most surprising aspect of developing MarcEdit over the years is the wide use and adoption of MarcEdit outside of North America.  While the MarcEdit user community is sometimes difficult to measure, the current active user community fluctuates between 15,000-20,000 users. Looking at update logs, I can see that MarcEdit usage (number of times the program is opened) is well over a million usages a year (counting just those users utilizing the automated update features).  From the file logs, it’s possible to gather abstract usage information around geography, and the diversity of the user community speaks to the universality of the issues shared by libraries world-wide.  While North American users are the primary user community, significant communities in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East are driving MarcEdit’s development to become more international and consider issues that primarily affect non-English language audiences.  This includes being sensitive to character encoding issues, supporting other national MARC systems (like UNIMARC) and facilitating the migration of library metadata (which is still largely in MARC8), into UTF8 or more diacritic friendly encodings.