Adding and formatting the 300 field using MarcEdit

We use MarcEdit primarily to deal with ebook records, which sometime have thorny 300 fields. We want to standardize these fields as much as possible while preserving valuable information. Adding a 300 field to every single record is quite easy – see this page for information.

However, some batches will be mixed; some records will have 300s and some won’t. In this situation, we’ve opted to add a generic 300 field to records that lack one completely. This involve just the smallest amount of conditional logic.marcedit8This adds a 300 field only to records that don’t already have one.

Reformatting physical descriptions to be appropriate for ebooks is more difficult – but possible using MarcEdit. More details forthcoming.