Hexadecimal representation of a MARC Record

For a good explanation of the MARC bibliographic format please see, “Understanding MARC”[ref]U.S. Library of Congress, Understanding MARC, http://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/[/ref].

Of course, the discussion of MARC is all well and good, but exactly what does MarcEdit do and can it help me?  The short answer, if your library utilizes MARC or XML-based library data, MarcEdit likely can be useful within your environment.  As noted above, MarcEdit was designed to help facilitate the creation, editing, and manipulation of MARC data…large sets of MARC data.  While libraries have done a very good job of creating shared metadata catalogs they have had less success creating local metadata repositories that can easily be manipulated.  MarcEdit was designed to fill that niche.  Consider the following scenarios:

Scenario 1:

Your library purchased eBooks from vendor X.  Vendor X provides provider neutral MARC records for each of the items that your library purchases.  However, before these records can be added to your local library catalog, you need to add a local specific note, generate call numbers, and remove all but one of the URLs in the record (since only one is applicable to your library).  

Scenario 2: 

Your library utilizes DSpace to store and catalog all your institution’s theses and dissertations.  In addition to having the metadata in your Institutional Repository, you’d like to load records into your local library catalog, but don’t want to have to copy and paste text from one system to another.  The above scenarios play out everyday across libraries across the world.  Libraries are provided metadata by vendors or have existing metadata in other systems and are looking for workflows to simplify the process of editing that data.  This is what MarcEdit can do for libraries.  MarcEdit provides a set of built in tools that could allow a librarian to process all the records provided by a vendor in one or two easy steps or can facilitate the transformation and ingest of library metadata into both non-MARC and MARC formats.  MarcEdit was designed to fill in gap for libraries, the ability to easily process large batches of library metadata — and demystify the batch editing process so that the work can be done by metadata librarians and not library technology.

Getting Started

Like most programs, users looking to use MarcEdit need to make sure that their system is capable of running the application.  This means knowing a little bit about the environment in which the application will be run.  What is the operating system being utilized?  If it is Windows, is it Windows XP SP3+ (MarcEdit 6-), or Windows Vista+ (MarcEdit 7+)?  On OSX, 10.8+ (Version 2-) or MacOS 10.10+ (Version 3+)?  Do the Windows machines already have the .NET framework installed?  Is the machine managed locally by you, the individual, or is the machine part of a larger enterprise environment and managed by your local IT system?  Is my operating system use a 32 or 64 bit architecture?  Do I think that I will be using MarcEdit’s developers tools to create scripts to automate the program?  These are all questions that go into deciding the specific flavor of MarcEdit to install.  And while that may all sound complicated, it’s really not.  Once most users make their way to the MarcEdit download page, the correct version to download and use is fairly straightforward.