The latest MarcEdit update has been baked and pushed out the door. If you are running a current version of MarcEdit, you can expect to see the program prompt you for update (unless you’ve disabled that functionality). Otherwise, you can find the update at: http://people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/html/downloads.html. Originally, this update was planned to be primarily cosmetic, with two small bug fixes. However, after working with a colleague playing with some large Hathi Trust metadata files, a few other updates ended up squeezing in. So what’s changed? See below:
- Enhancement: MARCXML => MARC enhancements. When translating from MARCXML
to MARC, MarcEdit will truncate records if the record data is too long (over
the 99,999 bytes) or the field data is too long (over 9,999 bytes). MarcEdit
will truncate records that are too long or split the field data if too long.
If either operation occurs, MarcEdit will recode the 008/38 to an "s". This
enhancement only affects the MARCXML=>MARC conversion function — however,
that means that any function that converts data to MARC through MARCXML is
affected by this change.I discussed this change in more length here, but essentially, this change was necessitated because I’m occasionally running into XML data that I’d like to translate into MARC, but simply is too large. The changes here allow MarcEdit when translating data through the MARCXML=>MARC process to automatically augment records that would otherwise be generated as invalid (as currently happens). If you’d like to see how MarcEdit handles these types of errors, you can look at a sample file at: http://people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/anonymous/long_xml.xml. This file has 3 MARCXML records. The first one is roughly 3 times too large for a traditional MARC record thanks to the many 9xx fields in the record. Prior to this update, MarcEdit would generate a record, calculating the length of the record incorrectly (it would calculate the length, then take the first 5 numbers in the value — since the record is longer than 5 values, the record length would be incorrect). After this update, MarcEdit will now truncate fields once the record limit has been reached and notify the user through the UI that the truncation took place, in addition to the 008 modifications mentioned above.
- Bug Fix: Swap Field function: Under certain rare conditions, moving data
from a control field to a variable field results in the delimiter value being
dropped on the swapped data. - Bug Fix: Set Font function — when the function fails, the program will now exit the function gracefully and render the font in its default state.
- Enhancement: Validator has been augmented so that invalid record
identification of records in .mrk format can be done outside of the
MarcEditor. - Enhancement: Added a new Change Case shortcut that allows users to set the
initial character in a field to upper case, without modifying the case of any
other characters in the subfield.
So that’s it for the updates. The MARCXML=>MARC changes were very significant changes, but hopefully they will be useful ones. I know that they will be welcomed at OSU since we occasionally run into issues of fields being too long when harvesting our ETD records from DSpace to generate our MARC records for the catalog.
–TR