Thursday, October 2, 2003 14:09 CDT Hi, Stephen, Luke, et al. Re: the MARC tool I had referred to and your response ... Stephen Hedges <shedges@skemotah.com> wrote:

baljkas@mb.sympatico.ca said:

...

As I have posted to the listserv several times, there is a VERY NEAT and FREE program available off of the Library of Congress MARC ... Tools page at URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/marctools.html#recordtools> called MARCEdit. You will also need to download the free tools MARCMakr (and MARCBreaker) from the same page. [snip]

I have not used this tool (because it *really* requires Windows, won't work on anything else), ...

I must apologise and plead guilty to being Windows-centric. I am sorry. In my defense, I think that what one comes to find as standard in a workplace tends to become what one thinks everyone has access to, too. Again, my apologies for not thinking about that incompatibility issue. I don't know if it's possible, but maybe people can run the MARCEdit program on other systems. My younger brother assures me that there is a way to run Windows programs on Mac platforms (he does this at home and at work), and my best friend has some kind of Windows simulator for his Linux system at home. Otherwise, I still would be willing to help out people on a case-by-case basis in record conversion, at least in the short term. Also: I don't know that this will help, but from the Programmer's section of the Help in MARCEdit there is this blurb (which does get back to the need for PERL which many of you programmer types will doubtless be more familiar and comfortable with than MARC): ======================================================================= MarcEdit and PERL: Description: Though MarcEdit is soley a Windows application, PERL afficiondoes can still make use of the MarcEngine, so long as they have PERL installed on their Windows machines. To use any of MarcEdit's functions, all one has to know is that the MarcEngine is a COM object, so calls to the MarcEngine must be made using PERL's COM syntax. For an example of this, see below: PERL Example Code: use strict; use Win32::OLE; my $obj_MARC = Win32::OLE->new('Marc21.MarcEngine') or die "Cannot start Marc21 Object.\n"; my $lret = $obj_MARC->MarcFile('c:\\documents and settings\\reeset\desktop\\main.mrc','c:\\documents and settings\\reeset\\desktop\\mainc.mrk'); print "$lret\n"; More Information: For more information on PERL and Windows in general, please see the ActiveState website at http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/. For more information on MarcEdit in general, feel free to contact the author at terry.reese@oregonstate.edu. =================================================================

... but from the description it sounds like you would still need to know some basic MARC, like tag 245 subfield a is the place for the title, in order to use the Delimited Text Translator. Or does it have enough help to walk the users through the MARC stuff?

Regarding this, your second point, Stephen: sorry, again. No, MARCEdit doesn't provide a guide to the MARC field structure or appropriate tags. Like me, it assumes that people working with the program would know MARC. In my defense, there, I would add that I did write Luke off-listserv with a mapping and referred him to the full Library of Congress Bibliographic Format online resource page for further detail. There are various introductions online to MARC format but probably the best is from the LC site again, under the link _Understanding MARC Bibliographic: Machine-Readable Cataloguing_, subsection MARC21 Reference Materials - Part VII. A Summary of Commonly Used MARC21 Fields, at URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/um07to10.html#part7> which gives brief descriptions of the top 10% of the fields (the ones occurring most often) and their format. The whole of that section would be an excellent resource to consult before data conversion, especially for programmers/sys admin folk unfamiliar with MARC but taking on the task of retroconversion of an old database to MARC. Again, on a case-by-case basis, I would be more than willing to help people figure out their record-mapping requirements for conversion. There's very little I can do in terms of Koha development, but at least I can help with this peripheral level of support. I think the link to that UMB section above should more than suffice, but if Pate or any of the other Koha experts think it would be worthwhile, I could put together a rough guide to mapping data fields to MARC for the wiki/koha site. Someone 'in charge' can let me know at his/her convenience. Again, Stephen, et al., my apologies. I hope the above does help somewhat. Cheers, Steven F. Baljkas library tech at large Koha neophyte Winnipeg, MB, CANADA