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BestMARC offers quick and convenient ways to evaluate, clean up, and supplement your MARC data. With this tool, you can make your catalog more helpful and discoverable by adding reading program information, 

fixing tags, genrefying, and more! Let BestMARC do the work so you can spend more time with your patrons and work on other projects.

Benefits

There are two subscription levels to help libraries manage their MARC records.

Alexandria AnalyzeMARC powered by Mitinet

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BestMARC Plus is entirely integrated with Alexandria, meaning everything can be done through two Alexandria utilities. No exports or imports necessary!

• Get a diagnostic of your catalog through the 

  Open Links in New Window
  Mitinet AnalyzeMARC utility,

  which includes...

  • Holdings by Location
  • Collection Types Statuses
  • AACR2 / RDA Cataloging Standards
  • MARC Record Fields Status
  • Brief Record Summary
  • Award Notes
  • Subject Headings
  • Reading Programs
  • Duplicate Records Summary

Alexandria EnhanceMARC powered by Mitinet

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• Enhance your records with the 

  Open Links in New Window
  Mitinet BestMARC Plus utility,

  including...

  • Award Notes
  • Reading Programs
  • Subject Headings
  • Record Repair
  • RDA Conversion

Alexandria BestMARC powered by Mitinet

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BestMARC Global users will have full access to features not yet integrated with Alexandria through Mitinet's web-based software portal. Check out our 

article for instructions on exporting and importing your data into Mitinet to make these changes.

In addition to the benefits of Plus, BestMARC Global users have access to...

• Record Source & Cataloging. Search, original cataloging.

• Subject Explorer. Find and add new subjects.

• Global Editing. Create and save powerful instructions to make batch changes to your database.

• Workflows. Combine Enhancements and Global Edits sequentially for easy processing.

• Lists & Selections. Focus on smaller groups of records.

• Checkpoints. Side-by-side record comparison, undo changes.

• Collaboration Tools. Account Management, Sharing Features.
  
  

Mitinet and Alexandria Terms

• AnalyzeMARC. Mitinet’s database diagnostic tools (Alexandria's Mitinet AnalyzeMARC utility).

• EnhanceMARC. Automated enhancements to MARC records (Alexandria's Mitinet BestMARC Plus utility).

• ExpertMARC. Data cleanups performed by the Mitinet Data Services Team (see Alexandria's Mitinet MARC Update page).
  
  

Onboarding

Interested in getting BestMARC for your library? Here's what you'll need to do!

Plus

Global

Frequently Asked Questions

Whom should I contact for technical support?

Preferences and Tools

Contact

If you would like to, click on the Contact tab and fill out all of BestMARC's contact information. This will make it easier for you and your staff to contact BestMARC's support team if you have questions in the future.

Best Practices

Here are some general recommendations for getting the most out of BestMARC.

Run the Mitinet AnalyzeMARC utility once per quarter (four times a year). 

Since you can run 

and get a diagnostics report up to four times a year, we recommend spacing it out to every few months. This allows you to check your MARC records on a consistent basis.

Run the Mitinet BestMARC Plus utility once a month.

Although this utility can be run more often than that, once a month is what we recommend. And you may not need to use the same options each time! For example, while you'll probably want to update reading program information every time, you may only want to do an RDA conversion once a year. 

Be careful changing punctuation.

For the 

we do not recommend using the Update Punctuation option as Alexandria works better without extra punctuation.

Test options with one title.

The 

has a lot of options for modifying MARC data. To learn what they do and if you would like to use them, you can 

or simply test them out with only one title selected. Then you can easily see what the changes look like.