marcli

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What is this?

MARC command line (marcli) is a tool to parse MARC files from the command line.

The goal marcli is to allow a user to parse large MARC files in either MARC binary or MARC XML form and provide basic functionality to find specific records within a file.

Installation

On the Mac or Linux the easiest way to install marcli is via Homebrew:

brew install marcli

Or by downloading the binary for your OS from the releases tab and marking the downloaded file as an executable:

curl -LO https://github.com/hectorcorrea/marcli/releases/latest/download/marcli
chmod u+x marcli

Once installed you can just run it via:

./marcli -file yourfile.mrc

Sample of usage

Output MARC data to the console in a line delimited format:

./marcli -file data/test_1a.mrc

If the file extension is .xml the file is expected to be a MARC XML file, otherwise MARC binary is assumed.

Extract MARC records on file that contain the string "wildlife"

./marcli -file data/test_10.mrc -match wildlife

Extracts MARC records on file that contain the string "wildlife" but outputs only fields "LDR,001,040,245a,650" for each record.

./marcli -file data/test_10.mrc -match wildlife -fields LDR,010,040,245a,650

LDR means the leader of the MARC record.

A letter (or letters) after the field tag indicates to output only those subfields. For example "907xz" means output subfield "x" and "z" in field "907".

You can also use the exclude option to indicate fields to exclude from the output (notice that only full subfields are supported here, e.g. 970 is accepted but not 970a)

You can also filter based on the presence of certain fields in the MARC record (regardless of their value), for example the following will only output records that have a MARC 110 field:

./marcli -file data/test_10.mrc -hasFields 110

The program supports a format parameter to output to other formats other than MARC line delimited (MRK) such as MARC XML, JSON, or MARC binary. Notice that not all the features are available in all the formats yet.

You can also pass start and count parameters to output only a range of MARC records.

Sample data

Files under ./data/ are small MARC files that I use for testing.

• test_10.mrc has 10 MARC records (MARC binary)
• test_1a.mrc is the first record of test_10.mrc (MARC binary)
• test_1b.mrc is the second record of test_10.mrc (MARC binary)
• test_10.xml same as test_10.mrc but in MARC XML.

Getting started with the code

Download the code and play with it:

cd ~/src
git clone https://github.com/hectorcorrea/marcli.git
cd marcli/cmd/marcli
go build
./marcli -file ~/src/marcli/data/test_1a.mrc

Code Structure

• cmd/marcli contains the code for the command line interface.
• pkg/marc contains the code to parse MARC files.

Bugs, feedback, ideas?

If you find an issue parsing MARC files with marcli feel free to submit an issue with details of the error, and if possible a sample file or contact me by email at [email protected]

More information

• Code4Lib 2021 lightning talk (slides and video)
• Understanding MARC: https://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/