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- Can MarcEdit Help Me?<\/strong><\/li>\n
- Getting Started<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n
- Installing MarcEdit<\/strong><\/li>\n
- Other Downloads<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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Can MarcEdit Help Me?<\/h3>\n
One of the most common questions posed by potential MarcEdit users is around the scope of the application. \u00a0Technical services and metadata librarians utilize a lot of different tools to edit, create, and manipulate their metadata…how is MarcEdit different and what does it offer that other tools might not? \u00a0It’s a great question…technology is changing rapidly and the library metadata environment is currently in a state of flux. \u00a0Understanding what MarcEdit does and does not do can help a potential user determine if the tool is worth investing the time and effort to learn. \u00a0So exactly what is MarcEdit used for?<\/p>\n
MarcEdit initially was conceived as a suite of tools to simplify the editing, creation, and manipulation of MAchine Readable Cataloging[ref]U.S. Library of Congress MARC Standards, http:\/\/www.loc.gov\/marc\/<\/a>[\/ref]\u00a0(MARC) records. \u00a0Developed in the late 1960’s, libraries have almost universally utilized the MARC record format to create and transfer bibliographic metadata between local systems and between libraries. \u00a0The development of MARC provided a single, universal standard that allowed for the creation of regional, national, and international repositories of library bibliographic data. \u00a0As libraries moved online, the availability of MARC data from repositories like the U.S. Library of Congress or OCLC [ref]OCLC Homepage,\u00a0http:\/\/oclc.org\/home.en.html<\/a>[\/ref] helped to facilitate the process. \u00a0Libraries developed communities of practice around metadata description, and distributed the work of creating bibliographic descriptions for materials found in the library. \u00a0Description rules like the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules and subsequent editions, the U.S. Library of Congress Rule Interpretations, the current work being done to create the Resource Description and Access (RDA) model, all have contributed in shaping the library communities shared metadata environment.<\/p>\n
So what is a MARC record anyway? \u00a0I think that this is a good question because librarians often conflate the word to include not only the physical standard, but also the various rules and interpretations that are used to describe how data is marked up in a record. \u00a0 Unfortunately, for the purposed of MarcEdit, this overly broad description isn’t particularly helpful. \u00a0MarcEdit is often described as being MARC agnostic because it limits its definition of MARC to the physical standard, and leaves the application of\u00a0descriptive rules to the\u00a0user. \u00a0This allows MarcEdit to work with bibliographic data in multiple flavors of MARC because the application does not expect specific data, like authors, titles, main entry to be in any one particular data field. \u00a0This allows the tool to work in many environments and provide metadata that can be read by any library system that can process the MARC record format.<\/p>\n
For a lot of librarians (and honestly, library applications), the MARC record is something that looks like Figure 1.<\/p>\n
![\"connexion\"](\"http:\/\/marcedit.reeset.net\/learning_marcedit\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/connexion.png\")
<\/a>Figure 1: OCLC Connexion record display<\/p><\/div>\n
Many systems and tools have been designed in a way that they are unable to separate the physical presentation of a bibliographic record from the physical format. \u00a0Figure 1 provides a screen shot from OCLC’s Connexion interface, and would be an interface that metadata librarians would be familiar. \u00a0The problem is that this is what many librarians associate with MARC — they see this display, the tags and their inherent meanings with the AACR2 rules, and conflate the two together. \u00a0For MarcEdit’s purposes, MARC is used to describe the binary format, as seen in Figure 2.<\/p>\n
![\"hex\"](\"http:\/\/marcedit.reeset.net\/learning_marcedit\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/hex.png\")
<\/a>Hexadecimal representation of a MARC Record<\/p><\/div>\n
For a good explanation of the MARC bibliographic format please see, “Understanding MARC”[ref]U.S. Library of Congress, Understanding MARC,\u00a0http:\/\/www.loc.gov\/marc\/umb\/<\/a>[\/ref].<\/p>\n
Of course, the discussion of MARC is all well and good, but exactly what does MarcEdit do and can it help me? \u00a0The short answer, if your library utilizes MARC or XML-based library data, MarcEdit likely can be useful within your environment. \u00a0As noted above, MarcEdit was designed to help facilitate the creation, editing, and manipulation of MARC data…large sets of MARC data. \u00a0While 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. \u00a0MarcEdit was designed to fill that niche. \u00a0Consider the following scenarios:<\/p>\n
Scenario<\/i>\u00a01:<\/em><\/p>\n
Your library purchased\u00a0eBooks\u00a0from vendor X. \u00a0Vendor X provides provider neutral MARC records for each of the items that your library purchases. \u00a0However, 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). \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n
Scenario<\/i>\u00a02:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n
Your library utilizes DSpace to store and catalog all your institution’s theses and dissertations. \u00a0In 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.\u00a0<\/em> The above scenarios play out everyday across libraries across the world. \u00a0Libraries 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. \u00a0This is what MarcEdit can do for libraries. \u00a0MarcEdit 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. \u00a0MarcEdit 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.<\/p>\n
Getting Started<\/h3>\n
Like most programs, users looking to use MarcEdit need to make sure that their system is capable of running the application. \u00a0This means knowing a little bit about the environment in which the application will be run. \u00a0What is the operating system being utilized? \u00a0If it is Windows, is it Windows XP SP3+ (MarcEdit 6-), or Windows Vista+ (MarcEdit 7+)? \u00a0On OSX, 10.8+ (Version 2-) or MacOS 10.10+ (Version 3+)? \u00a0Do the Windows machines already have the .NET framework installed? \u00a0Is 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? \u00a0Is my operating system use a 32 or 64 bit architecture? \u00a0Do I think that I will be using MarcEdit’s developers tools to create scripts to automate the program? \u00a0These are all questions that go into deciding the specific flavor of MarcEdit to install. \u00a0And while that may all sound complicated, it’s really not. \u00a0Once most users make their way to the MarcEdit download page, the correct version to download and use is fairly straightforward.<\/p>\n
For users within an enterprise environment, like a university technical services department, where one’s machines are managed by a central IT, the MarcEdit installer\/application does support push installation. \u00a0What’s more, the program includes the capability to provide automated software updates utilizing system group policies. \u00a0More information will be provided about this process in Chapter 3: Understanding the MarcEdit Preferences.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
- Getting Started<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n
![\"tip\"](\"http:\/\/marcedit.reeset.net\/learning_marcedit\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/tip.png\")
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