Converting MARC Records to a Spreadsheet: A Screencast Tutorial

The North American Imprints Program makes the AAS Catalog ideal for bibliometric analysis in the North American colonies and in the early United States before 1820, as I have noted before on Past is Present.  In this screencast, I walk you through how to export Machine-Readable Catalog (MARC) records from our General Catalog and then how to convert this data from the MARC format to a spreadsheet or CSV using the freely available software MarcEdit. Once the MARC data is in a CSV and has been cleaned up a bit, it can be used as the backbone for visualization, exhibitions, mapping, and other types of analysis. Please see our Digital AAS page to see how we use our MARC data to create databases and Omeka exhibitions, and please visit the “Digital Humanities Projects Using AAS Materials” section of this page to see how others are using data from our Catalog in innovative  ways. Please contact me if you put our data to work in one of your projects, and please also feel free to contact me with any questions or ideas for further screencasts.