MarcEdit 5.1 Updates

While I’ll have to admit that much of my time over the past two months has been sucked up by other commitments (like preparing my dosier for my six year review), I have had some time to make some significant changes to MarcEdit — at least — some significant changes to parts of the MarcEdit application.  For this update, here’s what’s changed:

1. Plug-ins:
1. The OCLC Connexion helper plug-in has been expanded to include more information from the Connexion menu screens.  So, for example, the old plug-in use to just pull title and control numbers.  Now, the plug-in includes addition data like other language titles, date, holdings, holdings count, My status, material format and Workflow value.  I’ve also added a simple search function that will allow users to select items for edit using simple in string matching and regular expression matching.  I think that the search functionality will be a big improvement for users working with integrated save files, but I’m a little worried that it might not be granular enough.  If that’s the case, let me know.   As with the previous updates, to install the new version, uninstall the old plug-in, restart MarcEdit, install the new plug-in and then restart MarcEdit.  I’ve still got to make this process easier. 🙂
2. I’ve also been working on a second plug-in.  This is the CONTENTdm Helper Plug-in.  For those of you at the Eastern CONTENTdm Usergroup — you seen this plug-in in action.  Essentially, the plug-in is designed to allow users the ability to perform changes against the CONTENTdm desc.all file.  For those of you that don’t use CONTENTdm, this is the file where CDM stores all it’s metadata.  For the most part, editing this file is a big no-no since CDM uses an inverse file index (I would guess) to create pointers to physical locations in this metadata file.  Change the size of this file by a byte, and all the CDM indexes are invalidated.  This is unfortunate, because many times, what you want to do is edit this file directly and that’s what this plug-in allows you to do.  Essentially, users can run simple find and replaces or more complicated Regular Expressions against this metadata file.  The plug-in manages the changes and uploads the modified data back to CDM in a method that CONTENTdm can handle.  This is a new plug-in.  I’ve used it at OSU, but I would certainly make a backup of the data in your index/description directory (particularly the desc.all and *.ind files before running the index.  I’ve yet to have it ruin one of my collections, but obviously, that’s in my own controlled environment.  We’ll see what happens once I get it into the wild.  My guess is that this should be completed by the end of the week.
2. Script Wizard:
• I’ve updated the script wizard correcting a few cases where scripts could generate syntax errors so that they won’t run.  Fixing the scripts was easy enough (all you had to do was essentially delete a character), but this will fix that problem.
3. Z39.50:
• Not yet completed, but I’m updating the Z39.50 client so that you can now query up to 3 databases at one time.  This has required a change in the UI for the Z39.50 client.  Should be updated by the end of the week — and once finished, I’d be curious to see what folks think of the new UI (and maybe suggestions for making it more intuitive)
4. URL Checker:

Lastly, if you have any big ideas for the next version of MarcEdit, let me know.  I’m starting to compile a list of big ideas for the next major release of MarcEdit.

–TR