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

Project	Language	Links	Notes
MARC4J	Java	http://marc4j.tigris.org/
javamarc	Java	http://github.com/billdueber/javamarc	Fork of MARC4J
MARC/pm	Perl	http://marcpm.sf.net	Umbrella project; see also CPAN
pymarc	Python	http://github.com/edsu/pymarc/
File_MARC	PHP	http://pear.php.net/package/File_MARC/	PEAR package; sanctioned fork of PHP-MARC
PHP-MARC	PHP	http://www.emilda.org/index.php?q=php-marc	Abandoned(?)
ruby-marc	Ruby	http://rubyforge.org/projects/marc/ http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Ruby-marc
enhanced-marc	Ruby	http://github.com/rsinger/enhanced-marc	Convenience methods for ruby-marc
marc21	Scheme	http://code.google.com/p/marc21
marcerl	Erlang	svn://pubserv.oclc.org/marcerl	Very alpha code
Scala-MARC	Scala	http://github.com/achelous/Scala-MARC
CSharp Marc	C#	http://bitbucket.org/mattgrayson/csharp-marc
MARC.NET	C#	http://github.com/willkurt/MARC.NET	basic start, not thoroughly 'real world' tested
marc_record.js	JavaScript	http://www.pusc.it/bib/mel/marc_record.js	Part of MARC Editor Lite

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.

MARC records for authority data are more common. The Getty Vocabularies makes both the The Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) freely available. The Guidelines On Subject Access To Individual Works Of Fiction, Drama, Etc. records are available from Northwestern University. The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) are available in many formats, one of them being MARC.