In this series, we wanted to take a few moments to celebrate some of the amazing tools that have been developed for and by librarians (and other library pros). These often fill a vital gap in workflows or solve a pain point that library staff encounter in their work.
We don’t mean the big tools supported by vendors. We mean the niche, often free, workhorse tools that build on particular insights and shared pain of the librarians. Something that someone has built to solve their own problem, but then they’ve kindly shared for others to use. And we know from our experience supporting free tools that these can take a lot of time and effort.
Cataloguing is an important specialism where custom workflows are often developed to improve or customise complex processes. And dealing with issues of different formats and different workflows (or to fill a gap left by a discontinued vendor tool) often involves a certain level of ‘duct tape and chicken wire’. Workflows can vary depending on the type of library but there are more than a few innovative solutions that have emerged from cataloguing and cataloguers.
MarcEdit is perhaps the best known example of cataloguer power tools. This is a free software suite developed by Terry Reese, aimed at making life just a little bit easier for library staff who work with MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging) records. But it’s not just about MARC – despite the name (a remnant of the original MARC to plain text tool), MarcEdit now offers a full suite of cataloguer super powers.
And one of the neat additions for MarcEdit 7 is that you don’t have to be an administrator in order to install it. There’s now an installer for those with user level permissions available too! Which might sound like a small boring detail but is a huge part of making a tool like this more usable for all library staff.
Metadata Maker is another one of the tools made by cataloguers for cataloguers. It’s a simple web-based application that aims to help cataloguers create ‘good enough’ quality metadata in four different formats depending on the needs of the system to which the metadata will be ingested”. And that ‘good enough’ is a feature that we really love. It’s open source, so you can modify it to work for your library.
And one of the interesting things about this project is that it was made thanks to funding from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library’s Innovation and Seed Funds. This is innovation seed funding that the library offers to library staff and academics. How awesome is that??
Pydantic-marc is a tool developed by Charlotte Kostelic to programmatically validate bibliographic records. It’s still in active development so worth keeping an eye on if you’re looking for a better way to catch errors in MARC21 encoding.
There are many, many more tools out there from Excel Macros to sort a file by Library of Congress Classification call number to this neat tool for libraries wanting to implement the optional arrangement of religions in the 200s.
So if you know of one that we’ve missed, let us know and we will update this appreciation list of the cataloguing tool builders out there.