vim-snippets-mrk

MARC21 bibliographic record snippets in .mrk format.

Contents

The mrk.snippets file contains snippets for bibliographic record templates for common formats and individual MARC21 fields. Tab stops, mirrors, placeholders and nested tab stops are used to provide cues, flexibility, and increase cataloguing speed.

Bibliographic record templates

• Trigger glossary for each format:
  book = bk
  e-book = ebk
  journal = jour
  electronic journal = ejour
  exhibition catalogue = exhcat
  zine =z
  thesis/dissertation = th
  DVD = dvd
  CD = cd
• Include a selection of MARC21 fields commonly found in each format. Multiple and additional fields can be subsequently added.
• Nested tab stops are included for 245$b and 300$b. These nested tab stops are removed and skipped entirely if their placeholders are edited. This allows for cases in which 245$b and 300$b are needed or not.
• Used to increase efficiency when cataloguing similar resources.

Individual MARC21 fields

• The three digit field tag is used as a trigger (eg. 245).
• Field variants are included using a combination of field tags, indicators and ordered subfield codes in order to cater for some complex fields and the use of the same field for different formats.
• Used to provide a flexible way of compiling bibliographic records field by field or supplement the bibliographic record templates.

Dependencies

• vim
• snipMate

Installation (without a plugin manager)

Put the mrk.snippets file into the snippets folder of your vim runtime directory.

• Use :set runtimepath? in vim to display your runtime directories
• Use :echo $HOME in vim to display your home directory
• Create directory ~/.vim/snippets (Linux) or ~/vimfiles/snippets (Windows)
• Put the mrk.snippets file in that directory

File type detection

Vim does not automatically recognise .mrk files. See new-filetype.

• Create a new ftdetect folder in your home directory ~/.vim/ftdetect (Linux) or ~/vimfiles/ftdetect (Windows)
• Add a .vim file containing au BufRead,BufNewFile *.mrk setfiletype krc to detect the file type without overruling the previous default file type checks.
• Restart vim to use it.

snipMate parser

To avoid experiencing problems with the snippets and the tab stops, set the snipMate parser to the latest version by adding the following to your .vimrcfile (Linux) or _vimrc (Windows):

let g:snipMate={}
let g:snipMate.snippet_version=1

.mrk format

The snippets use the MarcEdit mnemonic text format (also called "MARC Text File" format). This is purely out of convenience and as a way to maintain continuity for everyone already using MarcEdit. The .mrk format is used for display purposes only. It represents each MARC21 field in a new line using = as a delimiter at the start of the line, and a blank line in between different records. MARC21 field elements such as three digit field tag, indicators (x2), subfield (demarcated by $ and for the purpose of the snippets, escaped with a backslash \, i.e. \$), subfield code, field contents and relevant punctuation follow.

Transforming .mrk to .mrc

Use the vim-marc plugin to transform .mrk snippets to .mrc format and back. The plugin also includes syntax highlighting for both .mrk and .mrc formats.

Encoding tips

• Make sure to set your vim encoding to utf-8 when writing .mrc files by adding set encoding=utf-8 to your .vimrcfile (Linux) or _vimrc (Windows).
• Use vim-digraphs if you are handling bibliographic records with special characters. Vim comes with default digraphs enabled. Check the output of :digraphs to verify.
• If you need more than the standard 256 characters, you need to have vim compiled with multibyte support and use a multibyte encoding in order to input the enhanced digraphs set from the digraph-table-mbyte. Check the output of :echo has(‘multi-byte’) if it returns 1 you are good to go, if not check this blog post.

Bibliographic control

Originally based on the University of the Arts London Library Services' cataloguing standards, using the following:

• MARC21
• RDA / RDA toolkit
• Library of Congress authorities: LCSH, LCNAF, LCGFT.
• Library of Congress value lists for codes and controlled vocabularies
• ISBD punctuation
• Koha Open Source Library System

Contribution

Feel free to send me a pull request if you require more formats or field variations to be included.

License

MIT license