MARC Report: Find Next record

FIND NEXT RECORD WITH

Whenever we click on a brief message, the clicked-upon message is copied down to the 'Find Next record with' box. If we then press the green arrow on the right, the program scans forward through the file until it reaches either the next record with this message, or the end of file.

This makes it easy to 'walk through a file' stopping only at records with a particular message. When the program reaches a matching record, it stops the scan on that record. To resume the same scan, simply press the Green Arrow again.

'Find Next Record' retains a history of the last 8 scans; so if you want to go back to something you looked for earlier, just select it using the dropdown on the right side of the box.

When a scan is in progress on a large file, you may want to interrupt it: to do this, click the red 'Stop' button on the right.

And, if running a scan on a large file, make sure this 'Stop' button is visible. It might be pushed off the screen to the right if you have resized brief message panel too narrowly.

FIND NEXT: WITHOUT

If you are working through a file where most records have the same problem, you might want to skip ahead to the next record that does not have a certain problem.

You can do this by, before you press the green arrow to th scan, right-clicking the green arrow button and selecting 'Find next record without message'.

FIND NEXT: SAVE RECORDS TO A FILE

It is also possible to copy all records that match a message in the 'Find Next' box to a separate file. To initiate this function, right-click the green arrow button and select 'Save records with message to a file'.

A new file will be created, and each record that is found during the 'Find Next' scan will be copied to this file. When the scan is stopped, either because there are no more hits or because the red 'X' button was clicked, a dialog will pop up asking for a filename for the results.

NB. The records that are saved still remain in the source file of the edit session (unless you have deleted them there).

By default, this function stops at each record with a matching message; if you want to simply run through the complete file without stopping, select the subsequent option from the green arrow button's context menu: 'Save records with message to a file (NS)'

FIND NEXT: TEXT SEARCH

In addition to the above, it is possible to enter some text in the 'Find Next' box, press the green arrow button, and have the program scan ahead to the next record that contains that text.

By default, the program searches the whole record for the entered text, in case-sensitive mode.

If you want to restrict the search to a tag, enter the tag and a slash, like this:

020/0739378341

If you want to ignore case, then enter '/i' at the end of the text, like this:

6XX/history/i

One quirk of this function: to search for text that ends in a blank space, you must add '/b' to the end, like this:

6xx/Southern /b

(The above finds 'Southern states' but not 'Cooking, Southern')

The green arrow button context menu is not available for this type of 'Find Next'.

The objective is to keep this type of search as basic as possible. If it does not meet your needs, use the MR Filter, or MARC Review.

NOTES

If the program reaches the end of the file without finding a matching/non-matching message, it pops up a message saying 'Last record in file'.

Sometimes, if the program has been scanning for awhile it may seem like it is not responding to the stop button. If that happens, click it a few more times.

It is possible to manually type a brief message into the 'Find Next' box. However, the entry must exactly match the (normalized) brief message formatting used by the program: a three-digit tag, followed by a colon, one space, and then the exact message. Case does not matter. For fixed fields the format is: a three-digit tag, followed by a forward slash, followed by the element position normalized to two digits, a colon, one space, and the message.

A smarter approach would be to work from a Batch Mode report and copy (then paste) the message(s) you want to find from the batch report into the Find Next box.

Find Next Record is designed for casual use and will not perform very well on a large file. For example, running 'Find Next Record' in 'NonStop' mode on a LC file of 107,000 records takes over 9 minutes; running this scan using Batch mode takes only 61 seconds.

Again, if running a scan on a large file, you will probably be better off setting up a cataloging check set that looks only for the single message you are interested in, than running Batch mode on the file¹⁾.