Andy,
I have to say that my experiences with MARCEdit have been very different. I
have found it to be fast, not buggy, and completely capable of doing what I
needed doing. Mind you, I had some specific tasks I needed to accomplish,
but your account of it as "slow, buggy and always trapped in windows of
fixed sizes" was surprising to me. I have never found it slow or buggy, and
as for "trapped in windows of fixed sizes", as an iPad user sometimes using
iPhone-sized apps, I can feel your pain if that is the case, but I don't
recall ever feeling the pain with MARCEdit. Also, in all cases I've found
Terry to be very responsive to issues, as you can see from his reply to you.
I'd suggest your best avenue would be to pursue Terry's kind offer, as he
may be able to suggest a strategy for using MARCEdit that you haven't
discovered.
Roy


On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 6:41 PM, Reese, Terry
<[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Andy,
>
> Since I write marcedit, maybe I can help.  If you can give me an idea what
> you are up to, I'll see if its something that can be dealt with.
>
> Tr
>
> ****************************************************
> Terry Reese
> Gray Family Chair for Innovative
> Library Services
> Oregon State University Libraries
> Corvallis, OR  97331
> tel:  541.737.6384
> web: http://people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/<http://people.oregonstate.edu/%7Ereeset/>
> ****************************************************
>
> On Aug 19, 2010, at 6:16 PM, "Andy Kelly" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > Greetings all,
> > I am in a bit of a fix. I am working to get my library working up a more
> > effective copy-cataloging workflow and was looking for some software
> > suggestions.
> > I'm more or less trapped on Windows XP and have so far been running
> Mercury
> > Z39.50 client with some success. My search would end here if exporting
> one.
> > record. at. a. time. wasn't so painful.
> > I've been evaluating MarcEdit and it's associated Z39.50 Client. I've
> found
> > it to be slow, buggy and always trapped in windows of fixed sizes. It can
> > also only search one Z39.50 server at a time, so it replaces one
> bottleneck
> > with another. I get the impression I'm sort of in the Dark Ages here in
> that
> > we're not just OCLC copy-cataloging subscribers, but I can't seem to
> > convince my superiors that that service is worth making room for in the
> > budget, though perhaps this is a more common situation than I'm aware of.
> >
> > Ideally: I feed in a txt file or CSV of ISBNs and I get out one big MARC
> > record to feed my [ancient, fussy] OPAC.
> >
> > This might be one of those "...why don't you do it with a Perl script?"
> > problems that might get me to really dive into my copy of Introducing
> Perl.
> > (I've looked at the ZOOM Perl Bindings and MARC module on CPAN, both look
> > promising but far beyond my current limited abilities and likely even
> > further beyond my boss, future replacements and/or student worker's
> ability
> > to maintain or use.)
> >
> > Thanks for your help & suggestions.
> > ~Andy
>