Excel-to-MARC conversion plugin

Ideally, title list spreadsheets provided by vendors should be loaded into Alma using an import profile that can ingest the Excel or CSV file directly. However, in cases where this is not practical, we can use the following Excel plugin to convert a spreadsheet to a MARC file that can then be loaded using a binary MARC import profile.

https://github.com/pulibrary/ExcelMarcGenerator

This plugin allows one to map Excel columns to subfields in a MARC record. Templates can be made for specific vendors and Excel formulas can be used to manipulate data. The idea is that the plugin can simply be run on the spreadsheet without having to make manual edits beforehand.

Currently, this is used by the EAL for its vendors. The main reason is that the tool allows creation of multiple 880 fields, so that the title, author, and other metadata can be represented in both the original and romanized script. The plugin is also used to massage data that is not formatted correctly for MARC (e.g. extracting a year from a larger date field, selecting the appropriate column for the 300 field based on whether the work is single or multi-volume).