MarcEdit 5.x Update

It’s taken a little while to get this update finished, but I’m finally ready to make this available to the general public.  So what’s in the update?  Actually quite a bit, though I won’t go into a long list, but will say that there were some bug fixes (mostly related to UI or convenience functions), a couple of new API functions added (documentation has been updated for these elements), etc.

The big change however — is that I’ve spent a good deal of time reworking MarcEdit so that it will work better on Vista or Group managed systems.  The problem that people on these systems were having was that MarcEdit traditionally saved all data (config, temp) data into the Program Directory.  Since group managed systems (and Vista by default) restricts access to this folder by default, I’ve re-worked MarcEdit so that all the config/user defined folders/files have been moved to the Roaming Application User Directory (on 2000/XP — this is c:\documents and settings\user\Application Data\marcedit, in Vista, c:\users\[username]\app data\marcedit).  Really, the only directory not being moved is the xslt directory, and that’s because this information needs to be shared by all users working with MarcEdit.

The upside of this change is that MarcEdit should be easier to manage for people in group managed systems.  Also, MarcEdit is now profile aware, so multiple users on the same system can have their own MarcEdit profiles. 

So why did the update take so long?   Well, it’s the user-base.  If there wasn’t a large user community, this wouldn’t be a big deal as I wouldn’t need to worry about migrating existing user data.  However, since this process really needs to be transparent, a lot of time was spent trying to make sure that the migration of existing data was done smoothly so hopefully there won’t be any hiccups (or at least, those that I see are few and far between). 

What’s next:

If you have an idea for MarcEdit, give me a holler.  I always like to hear users suggestions.  However, here’s what I’m working on for my next update.

1. Support for ‡biblios.net — an open data repository of MARC data.  I’m a firm believer that the metadata that we create within the library community should be made as freely as possible, without usage restrictions.  And to some degree, that’s what the ‡biblios.net project is about.  Very likely, I’ll add support for this service as a plug-in to MarcEdit.  This will allow users to search, download and more importantly, provide a way to automate batch upload of bibliographic metadata to the ‡biblios.net network.  For libraries wanting to make sure that their metadata exists in a venue that will always be accessible without restriction, the batch upload tool should allow users to integrate into their existing workflow.
2. Like the first, I’d like to add the same support for Open Library, though I’m not sure if they currently provide automated ingestion mechanisms, so we’ll see.
3. Z39.50 — I’ve been working on this for a little while and will make available a version of the Z39.50 client that will allow users to query multiple resources at once.  At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll limit multiple targets to 3-5 or allow it to be unlimited — I guess performance testing will help me make that decision.
4. Enhanced XML metadata editing.  I’m thinking about adding an XML editor into MarcEdit to make it easier for users working with XML data and needing to do light editing a way of quickly doing that.

Download the new version of MarcEdit at: http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/software/development/MarcEdit51_Setup.exe
Download the redistributable’s (developers build) at: http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/software/development/MarcEdit51_Runtimes.exe

–TR