A forgotten MarcEdit Subfield Editing function 🙂

I was asked the other day at AALL (American Association of Law Libraries) if MarcEdit could be used to move specific data from one field and replace the data currently present in another.  So, an example — the ability to move data from a 260$c to the 008 position 7:4.  You can actually, though its sadly not documented (one of those few hidden gems that have been created either for specific projects I or others have been working on).  So how do we do it.

Open the Edit Subfield Function.  In the Edit subfield function, there is an option called Move Subfield data.  That’s that one we want to check.   Then, we enter the following (using the 260$c-008).

Field: 260 [Enter the field with the data that you wish to move]
Subfield: c
Find: [leave blank — though you can enter data here if you want to find something specific to move]
Replace: 008|7||

Ok, the Replace looks funny and it is.  There are essentially a handful of options you can set here (4) — I’m going to explain two for now (and will update this post when I update the official documentation). 

Each pipe “|â€? represents a delimiter.  The first two pipes are the most important:

1. Field to move to
2. Where to move (replace) the data

In the above example, we are moving data to the 008 and placing the data in position 7.  If I was placing the data into a subfield, I would have entered a subfield (example: c) here.  So, the edit form would look like the following:

–TR