Using task lists in MarcEdit to automate edits

by Rocío Belén Dressler on Mar 28, 2016

Working on a project recently, I found myself needing to automate an extensive set of edits in a specific order in MarcEdit. After some poking around, I found the amazing tool I was needing!

In the toolbar, click on “Tools‚Äù and select “Manage Tasks‚Äù in the dropdown. Here is where you can create and edit task lists that will do the heavy lifting in your marc files for you.

Yes, Koha has all kinds of nifty tools to perform edits for you – surf around some of our recent blog posts and check out the manual for more info. For my particular project, I need to be able to heavily manipulate the marc data before it is in Koha.

Let’s say you receive files in the same format over and over from a vendor, and you want to be able to flip a switch and get them ready for import. This is the scenario I used in the following video. The tasksare:

1. copy the 856$u to the 952$u
2. add the homebranch,holdingbranch, and itype codes
3. add the 942$c bibliographic item type

And voila! Just another way you can make your life a little easier, if you choose to go the route of editing before importing. Enjoy!