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Changing the LDR using MarcEdit

Just a quick update with a new workflow to add to this informal guide to my use of MarcEdit. The way our consortium (CARLI) displays format facets in VuFind recently changed and some of the MARC records for ebooks needed to be updated. One thing that needed to change was the “Bibliographic Level” in the leader needed to be changed from “d” to “a.”

I was unsure how to do this, but a simple google search resulted in Terry Reese’s helpful blog that explained the process and the function. I snapped a quick screenshot for future reference.

change LDR in MARC records

Unlike other subfields, the Leader is character specific and things cannot simply be deleted; they much be carefully replaced to preserve the order and spacing. The “Bibliographic Level” is recorded in the 7th position, so I ran this global change command and quickly made the switch to all 3,500 records.

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Bulk Importing Special Characters

I’ve been working on the North Park Archon project for the past few weeks and noticed a troubling trend. When I tried to upload the box/folder lists for our finding aids through the CSV import process, the system would reject all the special characters. Not outright reject them – just truncate the field before the character and move on to the next metadata sub-field.

Obviously, this was annoying and unfortunate – especially because I didn’t catch it until I had imported all the data.

It turns out that the problem was in the encoding language of the CSV document. For some reason, my default was set as ANSI; switching it to UTF made the difference and Archon’s scripts were able to import the special characters in the collection content field.