Working with MARC
Working with Marc
MaRC stands for Machine Readable Cataloging, and many folks in the code4lib community find themselves working with marc records at some point. This page is meant to be a round-up of the tools for working with marc. If you want a general introduction to the standard, the wikipedia article is a good place to start.
Desktop tools
MarcEdit http://people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/html/index.php
Getting Marc Indexed for Search Engines
MARC in Solr
SolrMarc http://code.google.com/p/solrmarc/
Solr http://lucene.apache.org/solr
MARC in Zebra
Getting Started with Zebra http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Getting_Started_with_Zebra
Zebra http://www.indexdata.com/zebra
MARC Programming Libraries
Java
marc4j http://marc4j.tigris.org/
Perl
You can find many packages for working with Marc in Perl of them at CPAN: http://search.cpan.org/search?query=marc&mode=all. Most of them fall under the umbrella of the MARC/Perl project on Sourceforge: http://marcpm.sourceforge.net/.
PHP
File_MARC (Pear package) http://pear.php.net/package/File_MARC/
Python
pymarc http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pymarc
Ruby
ruby-marc http://rubyforge.org/projects/marc/
http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Ruby-marc - some notes and recipes for processing MARC files in ruby
Scheme
MARC21 utility http://code.google.com/p/marc21/
Getting Sample Data
One common question is where to get sample MARC records for testing or playing around with. If you work at a library, chances are good that you can get some records out of your ILS (go ask your systems librarian if you don't know how to do this yourself). If you don't work in a library, you can get MARC bibliographic records from the Internet Archive at http://www.archive.org/details/marcrecords.
There is a nascent movement within the code4lib community to establish a test set of problematic MARC records, especially records that are representative of the kinds of weirdness that is encountered in real libraries. It is hoped that this could eventually become a test corpus against which to run various MARC processing implementations. For more information, watch Simon Spero's excellent talk from Code4LibCon 2010.