Thought I’d give folks an idea of what I’ve got coming in the next few weeks for MarcEdit. In the past, a number of folks had asked for an interface that would make creation of original records or the editing of individual records easier for folks that are not necessarily “MARC code junkies”. Well, the issue came up again this week — when I was asked by a retired librarian in Peru for a little bit of information regarding the use of MarcEdit to do original record creation. Obviously, original records can be created using MarcEdit (and I know of a number of places that do use MarcEdit for this purpose), but it does take a bit of knowledge of the MARC leader values if you are going to do any type of custom editing of the coded field information. So…
I’m working on an interface that would have much more in common with OCLC’s Connexion interface than the traditional MarcEditor’s interface. The current interface won’t go away or even be affected by the current changes that I’m working on — it would just provide an alternative interface for users needing to edit records individually rather than in batches. This will also let me tie a few services together to make record editing easier for users. For example, MarcEdit’s URL checker, MarcValidator, MARC Help, etc. All these elements will be able to be tied together to make editing individual records a much easier process.
What’s going to make this development easier I think, is that a number of the components that I need are already developed. MarcEdit has a template system, a set of components for editing control data (006/007/008) so most of the components that I need create a new interface are there — I just need to put them together.
I’ll post some screenshots as I get a bit further. At this point, I’m having a few folks take a look at the interface as it develops. Which, BTW, if anyone has need for something like this and would like to try the interface as it is developed, let me know. I’ll likely have a first, workable version of this sometime after Christmas.
Also, I’m just about finished testing MarcEdit on a Mac through mono. I’ve only found a few things that didn’t work straight away, and in most cases, I’ve been able to work around the MONO limitations — so we’ll see.
Oh, and I’ll have a small update to post when I return from my trip to DC. I’ve added some additional support for element sets to the Z39.50 client, as well as made changes to allow for sorting of the modified list and adding a search function to the z39.50 knowledge-base. I’m also considering moving the knowledge-base online so that as folks update this list, everyone can get the updates.
Other changes that will be coming at the next update:
- MARCValidator change: Ability to identity invalid records
- MARCValidator change: Ability to filter out invalid records
- New macro: New III macro for recreating overlay information in the 945 fields.
- Macro template changes
- Small changes to the Script wizard to clean up some of the generated code.
- MONO specific changes that fix problems that only exist in MONO dealing with a number of the dialog boxes (save and open), font settings, panel switching. All these have been corrected and while you won’t see any changes — they are there.
–TR