Another in the short series of posts dedicated to using MarcEdit to manipulate batches of MARC records. Right now, we use MarcEdit to batch catalog our electronic resources. This page is dedicated to a very simple and very common task: adding our institutional proxy to the vendor provided URLs.

Adding our proxy

In MarcEdit, go to Tools>Edit Subfield.

You want to edit the $u subfield of the 856 field, so select that. Entering ^b as the “field data” – and checking the “use regular expressions” box! – will use regular expressions to insert the proxy information at the very beginning of that subfield. That’s all there is to it!

Well…not really. To save myself even more time and further automate these tasks, I’ve saved this command as part of a task in MarcEdit. I called this task “Proxy all the URLs” and that is why the screen above is red. I’ve also added a few other very standard commands to this task. In order, they are:

Deleting all the existing 856$z notes. Get rid of them.

Adding our own, new an improved public notes and link text.

It’s worth mentioning that MarcEdit does these commands in order. If – for example – the delete 856$z was my final command, MarcEdit would very happily delete the nice new 856$z that was just created. So order matters!

That’s a quick overview of the “Proxy the URLs” task I wrote in MarcEdit. I like it because of it’s simplicity and consistency across multiple records and removes the possibility of error that typing or even cutting and pasting would introduce.

As per the usual, Terry Reese himself has a very helpful video on MarcEdit’s task automation tool.