MARC is the acronym for MAchine-Readable Cataloging. A MARC record  is the mechanism by which computers exchange, use, and interpret bibliographic information, and its data elements make up the foundation of most library online public access catalogs used today around the world.

The MARC Self Service Tool permits staff to request a file of MARC records as needed, without having to make a special request to Library IT. In production for ten months now, the MARC Self Service Tool is a web-based, self-service extracting tool that allows staff to type in, or upload, a text file of bibliographic record IDs or barcodes from Orbis. Submitting the record IDs to the tool results in an extract of the associated bibliographic records. The extracted records will be emailed to the staff person who placed the request in the tool. Staff may then take the file(s) of extracted bibliographic records and:

• edit them via a batch processing tool such as MARCEdit or
• ingest the bibliographic records into another local database or
• convert the MARC to other formats or
• in certain scenarios, share the records with a partner project site such as the Heritage of the Printed Book (formerly Hand Press Books), OCLC, or the Old Maps Online project.

Rich Richie from the Southeast Asia Collection has been using the tool and stated, “The MARC Self Service extract tool has been a great help in extracting preliminary Khmer language catalog records from Voyager. Sending these lists of extracted records to our outside vendor for Khmer records, provides us with a quick and easy way to build full level records in MARCEDIT and easily overlay the preliminary records based on the BibID. A useful and timesaving resource for this project.”

The MARC Self Service Tool  is an innovative approach to increasing the availability of Orbis bibliographic records and batch data manipulation workflow. We are currently developing a new feature of the MARC Self Service tool which allows staff to extract holding MARC records (MFHDs) along with their associated bibliographic MARC records.  Among other things, this new feature will allow the Catalog Management team to manipulate bibliographic records with their holdings records easily, for example deleting eBook cancelled titles with holdings. The new feature is currently in its testing phase and will be rolled out soon. This tool can be accessed from Staff Front Door Orbis: Reports and Tools Cataloging MARC Self Service.

Special thanks to Jenn Nolte and Bob Rice for all of their work on this tool!

For questions or comments about this service, please email Yue Ji.