1. Case Study: Fixing MARC data with MarcEdit and OpenRefine
Owen Stephens
CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group, 2015

2. These slides were developed by Owen Stephens (owen@ostephens.com).
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3. The Scenario
Institution changing their library management system and wished to migrate their catalogue data
Approximately 50,000 bibliographic records
MARC output from existing system would not load into new system

4. The problems…
Missing indicators / indicators added in the incorrect place within the field, rather than preceding the field
Incorrect characters used to indicate ‘not coded/no information’ in MARC field indicators
Subfields appearing in fixed length fields
Use of invalid subfield codes (in particular ‘_’)
System number incorrectly placed in 002 field, rather than 001 field
Several issues with the MARC record leader (LDR) including:
Incorrect characters used to indicate ‘not coded/no information’
Incorrect character encoding information (LDR/09)
Incorrect characters in “Multipart resource record level” (LDR/19)
Incorrect characters in “Record status” (LDR/05)
Incorrect characters in “Bibliographic level” (LDR/07)
Incorrect characters in “Encoding level” (LDR/17)
Incorrect characters in “Descriptive cataloging form” (LDR/18)
Incorrect characters in “Length of the implementation-defined portion” and “Undefined” (LDR/22 and LDR/23)

5. Steps to fix…
Use a text editor to fix some fundamental issues with the file that stopped it opening in MarcEdit
Use MarcEdit to convert to usable format and identify issues in the MARC data
Use OpenRefine to isolate and fix problems across all records
Use MarcEdit to re-validate and convert back into useable MARC data

8. Validation report in MarcEdit

9. Mnemonic MARC in OpenRefine

10. Filter by tag and indicators

11. Remove unwanted characters

12. Correct other issues…

13. Export back to MarcEdit

14. For a fuller write up of the process see: