MarcEdit: State of the Community *2020-2021

* Sigh – original title said 2019-2020.  Obviously, this is for this past year (Jan. 2020-Dec. 31, 2020).  

Per usual, I wanted to take a couple minutes and look at the state of the MarcEdit project. This is something that I try to do once a year to gauge the current health of the community, work that has been done, and provide some insight into future developments. And while I generally try to do this in January, like many in Library world, work life has been particularly hectic and unpredictable over the past year so I hope folks can forgive the tardiness.

Application Development

So first off, I want to talk about the work that has been done this year. At the start of 2020 – I let folks know that I was planning a year long push to update MarcEdit to the new .NET core, 5.0. Over the years, Microsoft’s .NET ecosystem has been messy, if we are to be kind. There has been open-source work (mono), platform/mobile work (Xamarin), .NET Standard (a specification), Frameworks and mobile frameworks…etc. This has made mapping MarcEdit development difficult as different frameworks have specific implications related to support. Starting in 2020 – Microsoft released a new roadmap. .NET 5.0 would be the first step towards unify the various platforms under a new, open-source environment. And while the grand vision wasn’t fully realized (.NET 6 now is where Xamarin/Mac code is integrated) a lot of work was done that allows for a major step forward.

To that end, I spend the last year re-doing large parts of MarcEdit to prepare for this transition, and as of Dec. 2020 – released a beta version of MarcEdit 7.5.x. This is the first version where:

1. Net 5.0 is the target.
2. Utilized updated UI components which finally allows for better accessibility and font rendering.
3. Shifted all library code to .NET Standard 2.1.

This rework allowed me to remove a lot of old code, bring in support for new crypto standards, improve performance, and add a bunch of new features. You can see the initial change long for 7.5.x here (https://marcedit.reeset.net/software/update75.txt)

Following the beta release of MarcEdit 7.5.x beta, I started reworking the MarcEdit Mac code and released a beta (3.5.x). Changelog is found here: https://marcedit.reeset.net/software/mac3_5.txt

I’ll be continuing to work on both of these projects with the hope of taking these out of beta and making the 7.5.x and 3.5.x branches the primary support branch by June 2021.

In addition to these changes – the pandemic meant that a lot of people suddenly weren’t able to travel or attend conferences or training. So, I decided to start a seminar series in early April – MarcEdit 7: Shelter-In-Place Webinar Series (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrHRsJ91nVFQEr_dPopYTAXUWYTKkcFpj). I presented and recorded 11 videos in all – often doing two sessions a week (one scheduled for a primarily North American audience, and one for a more international audience) – answering questions and addressing topics related to using the program. I did these partly so I would have a distraction from work and partly to give folks resources as this year saw many more people having to download and use MarcEdit on home systems. In all, I believe these workshops reached ~10k viewers/attendees and provided me with a welcomed reprieve from my day job.

Community Health

To determine community health – I look at a couple of things. The Listserv (is it serving its purpose), development, and usage. To help me gauge usage, I use a script that analyzes the server logs to determine how often the program has been used. This isn’t a hard number, but a good estimation – as the program pings the MarcEdit update service for information related to updates when the program starts. In a normal year, MarcEdit is run ~4 million times. That means someone opened the program to perform 1 or a multitude of actions. This year, that number was much larger. As more users were remote and more individuals were unable to rely on software that required a user be onsite – MarcEdit use filled in the gap (hopefully well). In the end, this meant that MarcEdit was run ~11.2 million times. I expect this will be an aberration and next year will shift back to normal usage; though I hope that this meant that this year, folks were able to continue to do necessary work and found MarcEdit somewhat helpful in making that happen.

A quick look at the community overall for this year…

Top 15 Countries by Use:

1. United States
2. Canada
3. Australia
4. Great Britain
5. Germany
6. India
7. Hong Kong
8. Taiwan
9. Spain
10. France
11. Colombia
12. Mexico
13. Italy
14. China
15. Russian Federation

Total Number of Countries/Administrative Areas: 171

Conclusion

Overall, 2020 was spend updating development to simplify future maintenance as well as providing new support options to provide self-help for many new users. With the move to a largely remote environment, the year saw an influx in new application use. I expect/hope that will shift back to previous levels as life returns to normal and individuals are back on campus an in familiar work environments. Finally, I want to thank the many folks on the listserv that answered questions and provide freely their expertise and experience to other community members. The community support is a large part of what makes this project work. On to 2021….