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.
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.
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.
Why is this screen red? Read more below…
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.
Deleting all the 856$z notes.
Adding our own, new an improved public notes and link text.
Changing the link text (856$y).
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.
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.This 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.
Adding, moving, and deleting fields is easy using MarcEdit.
We want to move the vendor name from the 710 field to the 797 field. This command makes that switch: Tools>Copy Field
This doesn’t change the indicators at all; if they need to be changed, use the Tools>Edit Indicator Data to make that change.
Adding a new field is very easy; go to Tools>Add Field to make the addition.
That’s pretty easy! These same commands can be used to add any new field to all records. It get’s more complicated with reformatting fields and conditional logic, but the basic adding, deleting, and moving fields is very easy in MarcEdit.
This is a partial, visual workflow to document local use of Marc Edit. This page details how to move call numbers from the 050 field to the 090 field and then append a constant “eb” to the end of the call number field.
Move the call number from the 050 to the 090.
Tools>Copy Field
Append “eb” to the end of the 090
Tools>Edit Subfield
By running a quick report within MarcEdit (Reports>Field Count), you can see how many records have 050 fields. If not all the records have call numbers, local practice should dictate the what happens next.
In several library contexts (MarcEdit, for example) , I’ve read or been told “have you tried doing that using Regular Expressions?”. Having no idea what this meant or referred to, I did a little wikipedia-ing and found out a little more about this method of matching text strings. Initial thoughts:
Yes, I think this can accomplish some important library-related tasks.
No, I don’t know anything about them.
I’ll chronicle my attempts to understand and explore Regular Expressions on this blog under this heading. I’m doing so with the intended context of MarcEdit, but hope to think of other ways Regular Expressions could be used to do library work.
In computing, a regular expression provides a concise and flexible means to “match” (specify and recognize) strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters
I’ll jump right in and discuss some special characters that made regular expressions so powerful. I like examples and getting messy, so here we go! I’ve decided to adopt a crime show format genre for my initial explorations. Enjoy!
