Issue Exporting MARC & Excel

I am trying to export my catalogue (+/- 1,300 titles) as MARC and Excel files. I have done this successfully before (about 19 titles) as a test run, and it worked.

Now, when I try the same thing, the MARC file is absolutely garbled (checked with NotePad & MARCEdit), and trying to export as Excel file results in an error message.

Any thoughts and fixes?

NOTE: when trying to open with MARCEdit, I can't see any .mrc or .mrk files - to find the (scrambled) MARC exports, I have to choose "view all files".

NOTE: I have searched previous threads, and this came up before but I don't think the thread was ever resolved: https://www.librarything.com/topic/333779

Thanks for the report.

Testing my own account with 535 records and Alex_McCall's account with 1,346 records, I'm only seeing one error in the MarcValidator tool on MarcEdit: "The end of Record Marker isn't present within this file or at the end of any record." There were no invalid records found.

*There is a related bug, when trying to change the type of export and run it—for the first time in the session, I think—on any of the export pages. I made a separate report for that here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/343483#7904803

For devs to reproduce:
1. go to https://www.librarything.com/export.php?export_type=marc
2. click the "Export all books" button to export as MARC
3. click the "Download" button when complete
4. use MarcEdit's MarcValidator tool to attempt to validate the file

Issue: Getting an "The end of Record Marker isn't present within this file or at the end of any record." error for all records in the export file.

Just pushed a fix that should resolve this issue

Reopening (the related bug should be fixed, not this one yet.)

>2 kristilabrie: Thanks for looking at this! While I grasp about 50% of it, it looks like you & the devs worked out what I was trying to communicate - relief, as I'm new to this.

If it helps, I'm trying to export MARCs to Koha for a new library that's being set up.

>5 Alex_McCall: Sorry for the trouble - we're working on this and hope to have it fixed Monday or thereabouts.

>5 Alex_McCall: I've deployed some more fixes/tweaks to MARC exports this morning to handle more of the possible character encoding issues.

>7 ccatalfo: Thank you! I'll try it today...

Looks like the fix worked (the preview in MarkEdit looks "unscrambled"). I will try importing into KoHa a bit later, which will be the final test and let you know the outcome! Thanks for the help, everyone!

>9 Alex_McCall: Glad to hear it.

There still may be some encoding issues on some records, depending on your export choices and your own data. I will work to get those ironed out.

>10 ccatalfo: I have some records that isn't even UTF when exported as TSV so your scripts for exporting as MARC shouldn't be too gullible :-)

I run everything through a

iconv -c -t UTF-8

before looking at it.

>11 bnielsen: Update: I imported the MARC from LibraryThing into KoHa, and all the records staged successfully. This time when generating the MARC, I opted for the "basic" option. Excel worked, too!

>12 Alex_McCall:. Nice!

I toyed with the thought of installing Koha locally and setting it up as a z39.50 source so I could import stuff from my own Koha to LibraryThing. Never gave it a second thought though.