The National Institute of Education (NIE) Library has been subscribing to e-books since 2002. Initially, the e-books had to be searched and accessed via the vendor’s platform, as bibliographic records were not provided. This meant that users tended not to be aware of the wide range of e-titles we held, and so we contacted the vendor, who agreed to provide customised MARC records (and free-of-charge some more!). After implementation, usage shot up as users could now carry out one-stop searches for both print and e-resources in the library’s WebOPAC itself.
Then, in 2009, we received a large file of over 2,000 records from another e-books vendor. The MARC records they supplied were very basic, and we found that it took several minutes to edit one record. Upon enquiring whether they could customise the records for us, they said they would have to charge, and gave a quote of about $11 per record. A local vendor gave a near-similar quote of $10 per record.
As this meant that customisation of records would be quite costly, we decided to explore alternative avenues. The enquiries led us to a free online software called MarcEdit that had been developed by a librarian, Terry Reese. After more exploration, we decided to try it out, and installed the software.
The vendor’s data has to be converted to readable MARC records. Then, after conversion, the necessary tags have to be added. We would, for example, add in our 096 call number tag, the 546 “Text in Chinese” tag as applicable, and most importantly, the NIE login script so that users can be authenticated before they access the e-resources.
It was at this point that we ran into problems. The other tags were easily inserted by the software, but for the login script, we could not place it as the prefix for the e-resource URL (Uniform Resource Locator) in the 856 linking tag. After much searching and making enquiries to online cataloguing discussion forums, we finally found that we had to use the “caret” or insert symbol to position the login script properly.
With this hurdle overcome, we gained confidence and started using the software to process bigger batches of records instead of a few at a time. Astoundingly, no matter whether given 100, 1,000 or 2,000 records to handle, the software completed everything in just a few minutes!
Interested to find out more about MarcEdit? Look out for our forthcoming presentation during the SILAS Knowledge Sharing Session!
Contributed by Yvonne Yin, Assistant Manager, Cataloguing Unit, NIE Library