Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee Approves the Introduction to MarcEdit lesson
Introduction
We are excited to share that the Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee (LC-CAC) announces the new beta Introduction to MarcEdit lesson. The lesson demonstrates using MarcEdit to profile, manipulate, and enhance library data in the MARC 21 format. It introduces the tools and functionality needed for many processes required for library and information workers working with library MARC data. This lesson is for those who have never used or have a rudimentary knowledge of MarcEdit. The primary learning objective is to provide learners with the necessary foundation to use MarcEdit and know where to seek more advanced skills.
What is covered in this lesson?
The lesson includes ten substantive episodes that cover MarcEdit fundamentals such as working with MARC data files, profiling MARC data, manipulating MARC data, tasks, and integrations. Lesson episodes demonstrate how to open and edit a MARC binary file in the MarcEdit MARCEditor and enhance the data to conform to local and national cataloging best practices and standards. The sample data set is adapted from a small subset from the Open Library CC0 Creative Commons License. The lesson covers how to profile and manipulate data in a single record, across all records, or in a subset of the records in the MARC file, covering functionalities like field count, reports by type of record, find and replace, edit shortcuts, and adding or building new fields.
The lesson episodes cover:
- Navigating the top-level menu.
- Working with MARC files, including how to create a readable MARC file from a MARC binary file.
- Navigating the MarcEdit menu and learning about available features.
- Profiling MARC data.
- Manipulating MARC records in your file.
- How to automate manipulation using tasks.
- Integrations with Z39.50.
- How to extend functionality with regular expressions.
Why a course on MarcEdit?
MarcEdit is a widely used tool and often referred to as the Swiss Army knife for library MARC data. This tool was created by Terry Reese to manipulate and enhance MARC data for a large cleanup project almost 30 years ago. Since that time, Reese, who continues to maintain this tool, has built-in more features to meet the needs of library and information workers who work with MARC data. As a popular tool in librarianship and library technical services operations, MarcEdit is helpful for anyone who needs to profile and manipulate MARC data.
The lesson was developed to help library and information workers manipulate and enhance MARC records to meet the needs of their local and national best practices and standards, a necessary step to be able to exchange or import records for later discovery and/or exchange with other library or library adjacent systems.
Course Development
The current Library Carpentry MarcEdit course has been developed and taught by the Maintainers of the lesson and other members of the Carpentries communities. The development of this lesson owes much to Terry Reeese, the creator and maintainer of MarcEdit. This is a new lesson in the beta stage and is being developed and maintained by Jennifer Eustis, Abigail Sparling, and Owen Stephens. The current Maintainers plan to further develop the content to ensure that new MarcEdit features are incorporated as appropriate, and to add more instructor notes to the episodes.
Why was this lesson approved by the Curriculum Advisors?
The LC-CAC approved the change from alpha to beta based on the pilot lessons taught. The Maintainers have collected and integrated learner and Instructor feedback from several pilot lessons, with plans to continue teaching the lesson in several in-person and online contexts.
What you can do
We invite Carpentries Instructors to teach the new lesson and provide feedback via the repository Issues page or by reaching out to the Maintainers. Our goal is to move this from beta to stable over this next year. If you are interested in contributing to the lesson in an ongoing way, we welcome new Maintainers - you can reach out to the current Maintainers via the links above to discuss possibilities. And if you have other ideas about building future MarcEdit lessons for Library Carpentry, and what modules should be included, please contact the LC-CAC.
Course author biographies
- Jennifer Eustis is the Metadata Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, where she supports the management of electronic resources and maintenance of metadata using batch processes. She is also a Carpentries Instructor and Maintainer.
- Abigail Sparling is the Serials Metadata Librarian at the University of Alberta Library, where she supports resource description, management, and discovery. She is also a Carpentries Instructor and Maintainer.
- Owen Stephens is a library consultant from the UK. He has been active in The Carpentries for 10 years, since developing one of the initial lessons, Introduction to OpenRefine, in 2014. He is a Carpentries Instructor and Maintainer, and also works on software development for open source library applications.