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MarcEdit
What’s New?
Leslie A. Engelson, Murray State University

ABSTR ACT Terry Reese continues to develop his MarcEdit soft-
ware, resulting in MarcEdit 7 being released in November 2017. This 
new version looks and feels different. This conversation group session 
explored the new interface, preference options, integration with inte-
grated library systems, and other new or newly discovered functionality.

MARCEDIT 7

MarcEdit 7 was officially released November 2017 but has been avail-
able for beta testing since August 2017. This new version includes an 
updated interface with enhanced help, preferences for ease of use, 
and ILS and WorldCat integration, among other new features. 

The user has a choice between two levels of installation: one for 
administrators and one for users without administrative logins. This 
enables users who don’t have administrative privileges on their computer 
to update the software without the assistance of the IT department.

Once installed, the user will immediately note a different inter-
face. At the top are quick links to help for common tasks such as “Edit 
a MARC file,” “Translate Excel to MARC,” “Harvest OAI Data,” and 
“Work with Linked Data.” This is in addition to the Help search box, 
which searches MarcEdit and YouTube for help and provides a link 
so the user can post a question to the listserv. The keyboard shortcut 
Ctrl+K will place the cursor in the search box. Finally, a Troubleshoot-
ing Wizard can be found under Help > Troubleshooting Options in the 
menu bar. An error number or message can be searched in the Wizard 
to help determine what the problem is.

Tasks have been grouped together in the menu to streamline 
options. For instance, all the record process options have been 
grouped under Tools > MARC Processing Tools. Additionally, more 
keyboard shortcuts are provided.



Conversation Groups  197

A new “Ease of Use” section under the Preferences gear icon 
enables the user to create and select themes, provide feedback with 
sound, and show shortcut keys and function descriptions in the screen 
tips. The default theme is the white background, which can be stress-
ful on the eyes. I have implemented the Dark Gray Theme, which is 
easier on the eyes but sometimes makes it difficult to see the cursor 
as it blends in with the color in the search box. This is a computer-
specific setting for the cursor and is nothing that can be tweaked in 
MarcEdit to fix.

Also under Preferences is the ability to enable integration of 
MarcEdit with Alma, Koha, and OCLC. Before setting up the integra-
tion with OCLC, the user will need to get two API keys from OCLC. These 
keys can be requested from this link: https://platform.wordcat.org/
wskey. However, it’s challenging to get the keys, as OCLC created these 
keys for developers and doesn’t really understand why a person who 
is not a developer needs API keys. Allow plenty of time for commu-
nicating with OCLC to get the keys in order to set this up. Integration 
with Alma or Koha seems a little less challenging but is not something 
I have enabled yet.

TOOLS

I briefly demonstrated the following tools, some of which are new to 
MarcEdit 7 and some of which are new to me. These are all available 
under the Tools option in the Menu bar.

 •  Select MARC Records—Both processes leave the original file 
intact and create a new file.

 •  Delete Selected Records —Creates a new file of all the records 
not deleted.

 •  Extract Selected Records—Creates a new file of all the selected 
records and will give the option to delete them from the 
original file. If deleted, two files will be created: one with the 
extracted records and one with the remaining records.

 •  Regular Expression Store—This feature is also available in the 
MarcEditor.

 •  Regular expressions can be stored here and accessed when 
needed.

 •  The tool is intended to be used to share regular expressions, 

https://platform.wordcat.org/wskey
https://platform.wordcat.org/wskey


198  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

but that functionality is not yet activated. When activated, 
Terry Reese will share his regular expressions.

 • Verify URLs
 • This can only be run on a .mrc file.
 • Checks URLs in all fields or just the fields specified. 
 •  The finished report opens as a web page with the URL as a link 

and the status code and message indicating what the possible 
problem is.

 • Batch Process Files (Ctrl+Shift+B)
 •  Use to convert files from one file type to another (e.g, Mnemonic 

to MARC, Dublin Core to MARC, MARC to MODS, etc.).
 •  All the files in a folder and subfolders can be processed at the 

same time.

 •  Data Clustering Tools—This feature is also available in the 
MarcEditor (Ctrl+Shift+T)

 • I think of this tool as OpenRefine Lite.
 •  The tool breaks down strings, normalizes away data and 

common diacritics, and sorts the data.
  Example: Terry Reese and Reese, Terry = reese terry
 •  The data use cluster can be customized instead of using the 

default options.
 •  Find inconsistent use of relator terms or forms of access 

points and fix.

 • Generate . . . —This feature is also available in MarcEdit
 • Generate call numbers (Ctrl+Shift+N)
 • Generate FAST headings (Ctrl+Shift+F)

Several of these processes take a long time to run so be prepared 
to let them run while you work on something else.

FIELD GUIDE

Terry Reese has created a field guide for help with using MarcEdit 
at http://marcedit.reeset.net/learning_marcedit/table-of-contents/. 
This is a work in progress and is not complete, but it is better docu-
mentation than has been available in the past.


