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E-book & Streaming Media Management

This guide describes E-book and streaming media collection management resources and tips.

Editing MARC

Below are some examples you might find useful when editing MARC record for e-resource collections before importing into Alma. You can always use norm rules to change MARC records for a set/e-collection after importing.

Move/Copy Field Value

If you need move/copy one filed value to another field, you can use MARCEDIT to achieve that. In the example below, we copy 001 to 035$a.

  • First, open the vendor provided MARC records in MARCEDIT. If the format is MARC, convert it to MARCXML first.
  • Then, click Tools on the top bar and select Swap Field Data:
  • Fill in the field information and select the actions like the picture shows. Click Process

  • To convert this edited record back into a MARC record from the Mnemonic format, you can press the icon from the toolbar shown below：

If we need to add extra information to the new field, for exmaple, add prefix to vendor ID and copy it to 035a, please follow the steps below:

  • First, open the file in MARCEDIT as we described above
  • Select Swap Fields, but instead of swapping 001 to 035, swap to a field that does not exist in the record, e.g., 036$a
  • Replace the field you entered in the last step with 035$a(prefix). For example, replace =036  \\$a with  =035  \\$a(PREFIX)

 

Encoding Conversion

Alma only takes UTF-8 encoded MARC records. If you have MARC-8 records, please convert it to UTF-8 before importing:

  • Open MarcEdit > MarcTools > MarcBreaker
  • Select the source and destination file. Choose MARC 8 as the Original Encoding and choose UTF-8 as the Final Encoding.
  • Open MarcEdit > MarcTools > MarcMaker
  • Select the source and destination file. Change the default character encoding to UTF-8

The file generated by MarcEdit should follow UTF-8 encoding.

Remove Fields

We want one 856 field because Alma import profile relies on a random 856 to create portfolio link. Multiple 856 fields may result in broken links. 

MARC records from Vendor usually are clean and only have one 856 field. However, records harvested from OCLC Connexion may have multiple 856s. For example, the record in the picture below has three 856 fields. Only the last 856 is what we want.

To remove unwanted 856: