P, Do you know what application these are coming from? MARC is Word? That's...that's just crazy talk.
To take the best advantage of things like MARCEdit, try to get the most basic form of the records if possible - preferably plain text. Especially if they can be exported with "MARC headers" intact. These include byte counts for the record and some tools use them to parse out fields, etc. Certain cataloging tools like Connexion will allow you to download binary formats of records, but they are hard to use outside of library systems. If you know any PERL there is a nice MARC module at CPAN.org http://rpm2html.osmirror.nl/CPAN_MARC.html This module was the heart of the MARC -> mySQL scripts we ran at CDP. They now have a XML module if EMus eat XML. It didn't require a thousand columns because it just went and selected out the appropriate MARC fields that would be translated into our 15 Dublin Core fields, leaving everything else behind. This module does require the headers to be intact however. Note that there are theoretical limits to the numbers of rows in an Excel table (which I've run up against doing the sort of thing you'll be trying). I'm tempted to ask for a sample of MARC in Word just to see it. Richard Urban rjurban at uiuc.edu On Mar 21, 2007, at 3:13 PM, Perian Sully wrote: > Hi all: > > So the pressure is on to import a bunch of MARC records (in Word) > into our > shiny new CMS (EMu). I need to convert the MARC Word document into > some > format that I can then use to recode the MARC tags into EMu-speak. > I've done > this with our old records using Excel, and would like to use Excel > again to > work with the MARC records (yes, I recognize that this may mean > that I'll > have potentially 1000 or so columns to deal with). And our > archivist is > quite against Excel, and says that he can only get the MARC records > in Word. > I don't know if this is true or not, but I'm pressuring the powers > that be > to see if I can at least get the records in CSV or delimited text. > However, > I'm working with the assumption that Word is what I've got to work > with. > > Unfortunately, all of our MARC records are in Word, and I can't get > Word to > break out the columns correctly (it wants to create a lot of rows > instead of > columns). I did find this older program, which makes me hopeful > that this > process won't be as complicated as I anticipate: MARC RTP > http://rossjohnson.homemail.com.au/MARCRTP/ > > But I'm wondering if anyone else here has had to deal with this > problem and > what you did to solve it. Did you have a software package that > helped you? > > Thanks in advance everyone! > > Perian Sully > Collection Database & Records Administrator > Judah L. Magnes Museum > 2911 Russell St. > Berkeley, CA 94705 > 510-549-6950 x 335 > http://www.magnes.org > Contributor, http://www.musematic.org > > _______________________________________________ > You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum > Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) > > To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu > > To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: > http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l
