Marcman

Like a man page for MARC. Marcman provides an executable (marcman) for quickly looking up MARC bibliographic fields by their code. It also provides a little quiz (marcquiz) to test your knowledge of MARC fields and subfields (because once I'd written the rest, making a quiz was easy and fun).

Installation

Install the gem:

$ gem install marcman

Run the program:

$ marcman

Usage

Give marcman a MARC field code to see its definition:

$ marcman 245
245: Title Statement

If you want to see the indicators user the -i flag:

$ marcman 245 -i
245: Title Statement
  First indicator: Title added entry
    0 - No added entry
    1 - Added entry
  Second indicator: Nonfiling characters
    0 - No nonfiling characters
    1-9 - Number of nonfiling characters

Or to see the subfields use -s:

$ marcman 245 -s
245: Title Statement
  Subfields:
    $a - Title
    $b - Remainder of title
    $c - Statement of responsibility, etc.
    $f - Inclusive dates
    $g - Bulk dates
    $h - Medium
    $k - Form
    $n - Number of part/section of a work
    $p - Name of part/section of a work
    $s - Version
    $6 - Linkage
    $8 - Field link and sequence number

If you want to know what is repeatable, use -r (and the flags can all be combined):

$ marcman 245 -sr
245: Title Statement (non-repeatable)
  Subfields:
    $a - Title (non-repeatable)
    $b - Remainder of title (non-repeatable)
    $c - Statement of responsibility, etc. (non-repeatable)
    $f - Inclusive dates (non-repeatable)
    $g - Bulk dates (non-repeatable)
    $h - Medium (non-repeatable)
    $k - Form (repeatable)
    $n - Number of part/section of a work (repeatable)
    $p - Name of part/section of a work (repeatable)
    $s - Version (non-repeatable)
    $6 - Linkage (non-repeatable)
    $8 - Field link and sequence number (repeatable)

The -b flag will try to open the web documentation in your default browser. For example:

$ marcman 245 -b

Should open https://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/bd245.html

Take the quiz

Run marcquiz to test your knowledge of MARC in an interactive quiz:

~ marcquiz
Question 1 of 10
Which field is "Content Type"?

1. 538
2. 026
3. 787
4. 336

Enter your answer (Q to quit):

Use the -q flag to change the number of questions. But really it's a demo of using the MARC spec data in Marcman for another purpose. if you require "marcman" in your own code you will have access to Marcman::MARC -- a big data structure with all the bibliographic field definitions.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/seanredmond/marcman. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the Marcman project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.