Evolution of MarcEdit

This weekend, I started working on a writing project — kind of a MarcEdit instructional, and in pulling together some information about the evolution of MarcEdit, I found something interesting — I still have functioning versions of MarcEdit from version 1-present.  Knowing what the program looks like now, I found it interesting (and slightly embarrassing) to look at MarcEdit’s various forms.  Also interesting — the very first version of MarcEdit’s source and resource files were only a paltry 10 MB of data — and most of that was from the images used in developing the help.  Today, the program’s source tree is nearly 500 MB of data, so there had better be some new functionality included.

Anyway, early on, the program wasn’t particularly popular (as far as I know) — so I doubt many people have had the opportunity to see the program in its early “gloryâ€? so I thought I’d snap a few screenshots of MarcEdit through the years. 

Main Application Window
MarcEdit 1-2.0 [1.0 was the alpha release, 2.0 represented the first public release]

You can see in the very early days, the only two functions that were present in MarcEdit was the MarcBreaker and the MarcMaker.  In addition, there was a rudimentary editor — but it wasn’t yet it’s own stand alone function.  And other tools like dealing with XML, Z39.50, etc. — forget about it.   

Main Application Window
MarcEdit 3.0

This version of MarcEdit included the first MarcEditor.  It also included its own help file and a plugin and diacritics wizard.  The diacritics wizard was my first attempt to really deal with charactersets in MarcEdit.   Prior to this version, MarcEdit could work with data from multiple charactersets (since it read data at a binary level) — but couldn’t display them.  While it still couldn’t display them, the diacritics wizard allowed you to define codepoints and map them to mnemonics.   The plugin wizard was my first attempt at providing users with methods of automating MarcEdit.

Main Application Window
MarcEdit 5.2

MarcBreaker
MarcEdit 1-2.0

You can see that you could break the file.  And if you look carefully in the lower left, you can see the method for accessing the precursor to the MarcEditor.  The other checkbox on the right, Quick Break.  Good lord, I don’t even remember what that does — but checking the help file, it says:  By default, the MarcBreaker is set the quick break, which means that the marc engine uses a single checking algorithm to break a marc record.  This particular algorithm works independent of the Marc Record’s Leader, allowing the marc engine to treat a marc file as a delimitated text file. Thank goodness it doesn’t work this way anymore.

MarcTools
MarcEdit 5.2

You can see in the present version of MarcEdit, you have access to XML functions, Character conversions, as well as the previous Making and Breaking functions.

MarcMaker
MarcEdit 1-2

Basically, it looks like the old MarcBreaker — which I guess makes sense.

MarcEditor
MarcEdit 1-2

So when you clicked on the Edit Records or edit window — this is the box you got.  Basically, the “MarcEditorâ€? in MarcEdit 1-2 was a textbox with a handful of functions like Find and Replace.  A mighty tool indeed.    It wasn’t until MarcEdit 3.0 when the MarcEditor made its first appearance.

MarcEditor
MarcEdit 3.0

At this point, the program had functions to globally add and delete fields, as well as do some basic subfield editing.  It was getting better — starting to form.  Though, it really wasn’t much better than a specialized Notepad program.

MarcEditor
MarcEdit 5.2

Today’s MarcEditor is a full-blown editing suite — which includes functions for global editing resources, deduping records, merging records, validating records, etc., etc. 

And that was it.  MarcEdit really wasn’t a very exciting program when it first came out, but at the time, there wasn’t much out there either.   If memory serves me, there were the LC tools created by Randall Barry (who I was thrilled to meet while visiting the Library of Congress a number of years back), the fine MARC.pm PERL module and MARCMagician.  OCLC and ILS vendors had their own cataloging tools, but I don’t count them since they were really niche and designed for their communities.  Today, a number of tools exist — great tools — something I continue to aspire to do with MarcEdit. 

Anyway — looking at the very first website FAQ, I found the following question:  Will there be an update?  The answer: Probably.  This is only the first version of the MarcEdit program, and though I have no schedule for updates, I would like to release a new build sometime after January, 2001.  This update will mainly deal with the Marc Engine, as there are a handful of features that I am currently in the process of debugging for later inclusion, at which point, I think the program will probably be finished.

Given that its now 10 years later and I’m still hacking away on this beast, I’d say that I really missed the mark on that one.

–TR