MARC Magician Product Profile

By Carol Simpson

Reprinted by permission from The Book Report magazine: Volume 19, Number 4. Copyright 2001 by Linworth Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

Imagine a predefined form for creating MARC records. The form already knows all the available MARC tags and indicators, but only shows you the ones you use most often. When you click on a tag, the form displays field and sub field definitions, describes the purpose and source of information of the field, and gives examples of correct data entry. Should you make a formatting error in your data entry, the form politely indicates the problem. When you import MARC records from outside sources such as jobbers or centralized databases, the form checks each record for correct format, and alerts you to potential problems with punctuation, materials designations, non-filing characters and control fields. For the obsessive, it even provides references to the appropriate AACR2 rules! The form can spell check all records in multiple languages, correct improper capitalization, or identify missing information. The form will even make global changes to data in multiple records. Magic? No, it's MARC Magician!

The successor to Mitinet/MARC Library Services, this little rabbit comes from a well-respected hat. Mitinet/MARC was the standard among MARC record editors for school libraries, but the limitations of its DOS heritage kept it from having the features of which librarians dreamed. Making a happy switch to a Windows environment, MARC Magician still operates on a frugal hardware platform, running on even the most basic PCs. For those who are accustomed to the Mitinet/MARC interface, the program provides a handy comparison sheet to explain how to transfer procedures from one program to the other.

Some outstanding features of the updated program include:

• The weeding truck - where deleted records go until they are confirmed for discard
• The cataloger - an intuitive cataloging entry facility, with both program help and cataloging help visible at all times
• The record viewer - a place to view records in true MARC format, including control fields, or to see records in card or label format
• Holdings information - a user-customizable holdings feature that may be tailored to the needs of any automation system (though several are pre-configured)
• Global editing - allows manual or filter-based record selection for specific editing functions, including changing field tag numbers and indicators or sub field text.

For those who remember the "warnings" feature in the old Mitinet/MARC program, you will be delighted to know the one no longer must wait until the end of an editing session to discover that there are errors among the records. The "Active Error Checking" feature provides a user-configurable routine in which certain errors are immediately brought to the attention of the cataloger. One popular level of cataloging precision, the Texas Library Connection standard, is available pre-configured in the software, but one may customize to any level of detail.

For those with a MARC editor within an automation package, MARC Magician is useful to filter outgoing records for consortia or to debug less-than-perfect incoming records from jobbers, consortia and other records sources. MARC Magician arrives with 23 cataloging templates, from atlases to video recordings. Should you need to create or modify a template (for a large series of videos, for example), simple editing establishes the pattern. You can even export templates to share with colleagues or use in large-scale projects, though templates from the older Mitinet program are not adaptable for this upgrade.

An add-on program, Card and Label Magician, allows one to print traditional paper cards and sheet feed labels. Even without the add-on, you can view records in card format, and even print them, but the printing is disfigured unless you have purchased the program. Don't consider MARC Magician to be an upgrade to Mitinet/MARC. It's a completely new program designed with working librarians in mind. If you can imagine it, Mitinet, Inc. included it in the program.

Carol Simpson, Ed. D. is Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Sciences at the University of North Texas in Denton.

Reprinted by permission from The Book Report magazine: Volume 19, Number 4. Copyright 2001 by Linworth Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

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