I put together a link checking program that searches through MARC 856
fields for broken links and generates a report spreadsheet. It was
originally in Python, but I switched to Java for a variety of reasons
(don’t want to start a language flame war). The result is the EZcheck
program above. If anyone would like to give it a whirl, feel free and let
me know how it works for you. There is no documentation right now, but it
is fairly self-explanatory and has tooltips if you mouse over each field.
We used this at my library and found several thousand broken links in our
catalog.



https://github.com/jswelker/ezcheck

https://github.com/jswelker/ezcheck/releases (It’s an executable JAR file,
which you should be able to double-click to launch on any platform,
assuming you have Java 7.)



The program accepts input in several formats. You can feed it a
tab-delimited text file containing a record number, an 856 field, a title,
and an author. You can feed it .MRC recorods. If you use the Sierra ILS and
appropriate user permissions, you can use the Direct SQL Access interface
to connect straight to the ILS without having to generate MARC files or
create lists.



This is my first multi-threaded program and my first major Java/JavaFX
project, so if you have any feedback on the code quality or find any bugs,
please let me know. I also have no clue how to package a Java app into a
.exe file or the Mac equivalent, if anyone has any pointers on that subject.



Josh Welker

Information Technology Librarian

James C. Kirkpatrick Library

University of Central Missouri

Warrensburg, MO 64093

JCKL 2260

660.543.8022