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marcxmlr

MARC 21 and MARCXML

MARC 21 stands for Machine-Readable Cataloging and is a family of communication formats used to represent and exchange bibliographic, authority, holdings, classification and community information. The examples in this README use bibliographic MARC 21.

MARCXML is the XML representation of MARC 21. It expresses the same logical record structure through XML elements and attributes rather than through the compact traditional MARC serialization.

marcxmlr is an R package for bringing MARCXML into ordinary analytical workflows without first discarding the structure that makes MARC meaningful. The central idea of the package is not simply XML parsing: it is a documented, analyst-friendly rectangular representation of MARC structure.

Installation

Install the current CRAN release with:

install.packages("marcxmlr")

To install the current development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("larry77/marcxmlr")

Source installation from GitHub requires a C toolchain and libxml2 development headers and libraries. On Debian and Ubuntu these are normally provided by r-base-dev and libxml2-dev; Windows source builds use Rtools.

How a MARC record is structured

A MARC record is not a conventional rectangular observation with one value for each variable. It is an ordered structured record. In its traditional machine-readable form, a record contains a Leader, a Directory, and an ordered sequence of variable fields. The Directory is structural bookkeeping for the compact MARC serialization: it records where the variable fields occur in the record.

For analytical purposes, the important content-bearing structure is easier to see by distinguishing three cases:

• a Leader, which occurs once at the beginning of the record;
• control fields such as 001 or 008, which contain a value but no indicators or subfields; and
• data fields such as 100, 245, 264, 650 or 856, which contain a three-digit tag, two indicators, and an ordered sequence of coded subfields.

Both fields and subfields can repeat.

In conventional MARC notation, a title statement might look like:

245 10 $a Nineteen eighty-four / $c George Orwell.

Here 245 is the field tag, 1 and 0 are the two indicators, $a contains the main title information, and $c contains the statement of responsibility. The meaning of a particular tag, indicator or subfield comes from MARC 21; for example, the Library of Congress documents these definitions in the MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data.

The same field in MARCXML is:

<datafield tag="245" ind1="1" ind2="0">
  <subfield code="a">Nineteen eighty-four /</subfield>
  <subfield code="c">George Orwell.</subfield>
</datafield>

The XML hierarchy carries information that matters. The two <subfield> elements are children of one particular <datafield> instance, and their order is explicit. Repeated sibling <datafield> elements remain distinct even if they have the same tag and indicators.

A subject field gives another example:

<datafield tag="650" ind1=" " ind2="0">
  <subfield code="a">Totalitarianism</subfield>
  <subfield code="v">Fiction.</subfield>
</datafield>

The blank first indicator is an actual MARC value. It is not missing data. A representation that intends to preserve MARC faithfully has to distinguish that blank from a case where indicators do not apply at all, as for a Leader or control field.

Why a simple flat table is not enough

A tempting analytical representation of a bibliographic record is one row per record:

Such a table may be exactly what one particular analysis needs, but it is not a general representation of the MARC record.

Consider two distinct subject fields:

650 _0 $a Totalitarianism $v Fiction
650 _0 $a Dystopias $v Fiction

These are two different 650 field instances. Each $v Fiction belongs to one particular occurrence of 650.

If values are flattened independently by tag and subfield code, we might obtain:

650$a = "Totalitarianism || Dystopias"
650$v = "Fiction || Fiction"

All values are still present, but field membership has disappeared. With more heterogeneous repeated fields, the original associations cannot in general be reconstructed unambiguously.

The same problem appears inside a single field when a subfield code repeats:

856 40 $u https://example.org/1984 $y Full text $y Mirror

The two $y values are two ordered occurrences inside one specific 856 field. A faithful general representation therefore has to preserve several levels of identity and order:

record
  ↓
field instance
  ↓
field tag, indicators and field position
  ↓
ordered subfield instances
  ↓
subfield code, value, order and occurrence

This is the representational problem addressed by marcxmlr. The package does not force MARC into a task-specific wide table during import. Instead, it first creates a rectangular representation in which the original relationships remain explicit. The analyst can then simplify that representation deliberately when the purpose of the analysis is known.

The canonical representation

The central idea of marcxmlr is a fixed canonical representation of MARC content. It is a long rectangular table with exactly 11 columns. The hierarchy has not disappeared: it has been translated into explicit coordinates.

The representation is designed to satisfy two goals at the same time:

1. structural fidelity — records, field instances, indicators, repeated fields, repeated subfields and source order remain distinguishable; and
2. analytical usability — the result is an ordinary R table that can be filtered, grouped, joined, reshaped and visualized with familiar tools.

This second point is important. The canonical table is not merely an internal serialization format. It is intended to be pleasant to analyse. A librarian who knows that the main title is in 245 $a, for example, can ask for rows where the tag is 245 and the subfield code is a; there is no need to formulate XPath expressions or navigate XML nodes during analysis.

The canonical representation is therefore a structural analytical layer, not a prescribed final table. One analysis may retain only titles and publishers, another may study repeated subject headings, and another may select or edit complete records before serializing them back to MARCXML.

What one canonical row represents

The row meaning depends on the MARC structure being represented:

• the Leader contributes one row;
• each control field contributes one row; and
• each subfield occurrence of a data field contributes one row.

For a data field with several subfields, field-level information such as the tag, indicators and field position is repeated on every row belonging to that field. That repetition is deliberate. It lets each row carry enough context for direct analysis while still making it possible to identify which rows belong to the same field instance.

MARC tags remain values in the tag column rather than becoming columns of their own. The schema therefore does not change when a catalogue contains an unusual but structurally valid field. MARC knowledge determines what a field means; the canonical representation determines how its structure is retained.

The 11 columns

Every canonical result contains these columns, in this order:

The columns are easier to understand as four related groups.

Identity and structural kind. record_id groups every canonical row produced from the same MARC record. It is deliberately distinct from control field 001, which is source metadata and may be absent, nonnumeric or duplicated across files. field_type distinguishes Leaders, control fields and data fields.

MARC content. tag, subfield_code, value, ind1 and ind2 carry the content designation and values present in the source. For Leaders and control fields, subfield and indicator columns are NA because those concepts do not apply. A blank data-field indicator is instead preserved as the literal one-character string " ".

Structural coordinates. record_id, field_order and subfield_order are the principal coordinates of the hierarchy. Rows from the same data field share the same record_id and field_order; subfield_order preserves the sequence inside that field. These coordinates retain field membership and source order and are the coordinates needed for faithful reconstruction.

Analytical occurrence coordinates. field_occurrence and subfield_occurrence are derived conveniences for analysis. They number repetition directly, making questions such as “the second 650 in this record” or “the second $y in this 856” easy to state. They are not the authoritative source of serialization order; field_order and subfield_order already encode that structure.

The small amount of redundancy is intentional. Repeating field context and storing occurrence numbers makes the table easier to inspect, filter, group and join. The package favours an explicit analyst-friendly representation over a minimally encoded one.

A complete example used throughout this README

The package bundles the following synthetic record as inst/extdata/orwell-marcxml.xml. Every example below refers to this same record.

<record xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/MARC21/slim">
  <leader>00000cam a2200000 i 4500</leader>
  <controlfield tag="001">12345</controlfield>

  <datafield tag="100" ind1="1" ind2=" ">
    <subfield code="a">Orwell, George,</subfield>
    <subfield code="d">1903-1950.</subfield>
  </datafield>

  <datafield tag="245" ind1="1" ind2="0">
    <subfield code="a">Nineteen eighty-four /</subfield>
    <subfield code="c">George Orwell.</subfield>
  </datafield>

  <datafield tag="264" ind1=" " ind2="1">
    <subfield code="a">London :</subfield>
    <subfield code="b">Secker &amp; Warburg,</subfield>
    <subfield code="c">1949.</subfield>
  </datafield>

  <datafield tag="650" ind1=" " ind2="0">
    <subfield code="a">Totalitarianism</subfield>
    <subfield code="v">Fiction.</subfield>
  </datafield>

  <datafield tag="650" ind1=" " ind2="0">
    <subfield code="a">Dystopias.</subfield>
    <subfield code="v">Fiction.</subfield>
  </datafield>

  <datafield tag="856" ind1="4" ind2="0">
    <subfield code="u">https://example.org/1984</subfield>
    <subfield code="y">Full text</subfield>
    <subfield code="y">Mirror</subfield>
  </datafield>
</record>

In canonical form, that one record becomes 16 rows and exactly 11 columns. For readability, <blank> below denotes the actual one-character indicator value " ":

Several features are visible directly:

• both 650 fields have the same tag but different field_order and field_occurrence values;
• the two rows of each 650 share the same field_order, so $a and $v remain attached to the correct field instance;
• the two 856 $y values remain distinct, with subfield_occurrence values 1 and 2;
• indicators remain attached to every row belonging to their data-field instance; and
• source order is retained at both field and subfield level.

Why the representation is analyst-friendly

For someone who knows MARC 21, catalogue questions translate naturally into conditions on documented columns. In plain language:

The package does not need to know that 245 is a title field or that 264 #1 $b identifies a publisher. That semantic knowledge comes from MARC 21. marcxmlr provides a stable representation in which the corresponding conditions can be expressed with ordinary tabular operations.

This is why the representation is deliberately richer than many final analytical products. It preserves relationships before the analyst decides which ones can safely be discarded. Canonical to simplified is easy; simplified to canonical may be impossible.

What semantic preservation means

marcxmlr preserves the represented MARC structure and values, not the incidental byte-level serialization of the XML file. A read/write cycle can preserve Leaders, control fields, data-field instances, indicators, subfields, repetition, values and ordering without reproducing the same indentation, namespace-prefix spelling, attribute order or other formatting details.

This preserve-first principle is the package’s main design choice: field membership, order or repetition discarded during import may be impossible to reconstruct unambiguously afterward.

Working with the same record in R

All examples below use the exact record shown above. It is bundled with the package, so nothing needs to be downloaded.

library(marcxmlr)
library(dplyr)

source_xml <- system.file(
  "extdata",
  "orwell-marcxml.xml",
  package = "marcxmlr"
)

marc <- read_marcxml(source_xml)

dim(marc)
#> [1] 16 11

The result is an ordinary tibble with the canonical columns described above. Now the plain-language conditions can be translated directly into dplyr.

What is the main title?

MARC 21 says that the main title is in 245 $a: tag is 245 and subfield code is a.

marc |>
  filter(tag == "245", subfield_code == "a") |>
  select(record_id, value)
#> # A tibble: 1 × 2
#>   record_id value
#>       <int> <chr>
#> 1         1 Nineteen eighty-four /

Which publisher is named in the publication statement?

For this record, 264 #1 $b identifies the publisher: tag is 264, the second indicator is 1, and the subfield code is b.

marc |>
  filter(tag == "264", ind2 == "1", subfield_code == "b") |>
  select(record_id, value)
#> # A tibble: 1 × 2
#>   record_id value
#>       <int> <chr>
#> 1         1 Secker & Warburg,

The important transition is from a catalogue question, to its MARC content designation, to ordinary table columns. XML traversal is no longer part of the analysis.

Which complete subject field contains 650 $a Totalitarianism?

Sometimes the row that matches is not the whole answer. Here the question is not only to find $a Totalitarianism, but to keep the complete 650 field to which it belongs. Rows from one data-field instance share record_id and field_order, so the field can be selected as a group:

marc |>
  group_by(record_id, field_order) |>
  filter(
    any(
      tag == "650" &
        subfield_code == "a" &
        value == "Totalitarianism"
    )
  ) |>
  ungroup() |>
  select(record_id, field_order, tag, subfield_code, value)
#> # A tibble: 2 × 5
#>   record_id field_order tag   subfield_code value
#>       <int>       <int> <chr> <chr>         <chr>
#> 1         1           5 650   a             Totalitarianism
#> 2         1           5 650   v             Fiction.

The condition matches only $a Totalitarianism, but the result also contains its associated $v Fiction. because both rows belong to the same field.

Inspect repetition directly

The two subject fields remain separate:

marc |>
  filter(tag == "650", subfield_code == "a") |>
  select(record_id, field_order, field_occurrence, value)
#> # A tibble: 2 × 4
#>   record_id field_order field_occurrence value
#>       <int>       <int>            <int> <chr>
#> 1         1           5                1 Totalitarianism
#> 2         1           6                2 Dystopias.

Repetition inside one field is equally explicit:

marc |>
  filter(tag == "856") |>
  select(subfield_code, value, subfield_order, subfield_occurrence)
#> # A tibble: 3 × 4
#>   subfield_code value                    subfield_order subfield_occurrence
#>   <chr>         <chr>                             <int>               <int>
#> 1 u             https://example.org/1984              1                   1
#> 2 y             Full text                             2                   1
#> 3 y             Mirror                                3                   2

Derive a simpler analytical table

The canonical representation preserves structure first. A simpler table can then be derived deliberately for a particular analysis. For example, keep one title and collapse each 650 field to a readable subject string:

titles <- marc |>
  filter(tag == "245", subfield_code == "a") |>
  transmute(record_id, title = value)

subjects <- marc |>
  filter(tag == "650") |>
  group_by(record_id, field_order) |>
  summarise(
    subject = paste(value, collapse = " ; "),
    .groups = "drop"
  ) |>
  group_by(record_id) |>
  summarise(
    subjects = paste(subject, collapse = " | "),
    .groups = "drop"
  )

left_join(titles, subjects, by = "record_id")
#> # A tibble: 1 × 3
#>   record_id title                    subjects
#>       <int> <chr>                    <chr>
#> 1         1 Nineteen eighty-four /   Totalitarianism ; Fiction. | Dystopias. ; Fiction.

This is the intended asymmetry: once the MARC structure is preserved, it is easy to collapse it for a particular purpose. Reconstructing field membership after it has already been discarded may be impossible.

Modify one repeated subfield

Because subfield_occurrence makes repetition explicit, a particular repeated value can be changed without affecting its neighbour. Here only the second 856 $y changes:

edited <- marc |>
  mutate(
    value = if_else(
      record_id == 1L &
        tag == "856" &
        subfield_code == "y" &
        subfield_occurrence == 2L,
      "Backup access",
      value
    )
  )

edited |>
  filter(tag == "856") |>
  select(subfield_code, value, subfield_occurrence)
#> # A tibble: 3 × 3
#>   subfield_code value                    subfield_occurrence
#>   <chr>         <chr>                                  <int>
#> 1 u             https://example.org/1984                   1
#> 2 y             Full text                                  1
#> 3 y             Backup access                              2

Diagnose before writing

After filtering or editing canonical data, diagnose_canonical() can inspect whether the representation still satisfies the structural contract required for safe serialization.

diagnostics <- diagnose_canonical(edited)
diagnostics
#> # A tibble: 0 × 6
#> # ℹ 6 variables: severity <chr>, code <chr>, message <chr>, record_id <int>,
#> #   field_order <int>, subfield_order <int>

An empty diagnostics tibble means that no structural issue was found. The function checks the canonical representation used by marcxmlr; it is not a complete MARC 21 content validator and does not replace MARCXML schema validation.

For Arrow datasets and lazy Arrow queries, diagnose_canonical() validates the representation incrementally without collecting the entire dataset into memory. Records must appear in non-decreasing record_id order. Gaps in record identifiers may produce warnings without indicating structural errors.

write_marcxml() performs the required structural checks itself before writing. Calling diagnose_canonical() explicitly is useful when data have been filtered or edited because the result can be inspected before any XML file is created.

Write MARCXML and read it back

A structurally coherent canonical table can be serialized again:

out_xml <- tempfile(fileext = ".xml")
write_marcxml(edited, out_xml)

roundtrip <- read_marcxml(out_xml)
identical(edited, roundtrip)
#> [1] TRUE

The round trip preserves the MARC semantics represented by the canonical table, not incidental XML formatting such as indentation or attribute order.

A complete record can likewise be selected and exported with ordinary table operations before writing.

Handling malformed MARC records

By default, read_marcxml() stops when it encounters a structurally malformed MARC record. Alternatively, on_marc_error = "skip" skips the entire malformed record and continues processing. An error report is required in this mode:

marc <- read_marcxml(
  source_xml,
  on_marc_error = "skip",
  error_report = "marc-errors.csv"
)

The same options are available in marcxml_to_parquet(). The report identifies skipped records and includes the diagnostic reason and original record XML. Source-position gaps in record_id are preserved.

Recovery applies only to MARC-level structural errors. XML syntax and encoding errors remain fatal; the package does not silently repair malformed XML.

Large collections and Parquet

Both the in-memory and Parquet workflows use the same 11-column canonical representation. The practical difference is where that representation lives.

Use read_marcxml() when the source and expanded canonical result fit comfortably in memory. The n_max argument can restrict parsing to the first records, which is useful for previews and development:

preview <- read_marcxml(
  source_xml,
  n_max = 1L
)

unique(preview$record_id)
#> [1] 1

For larger collections, materializing all canonical rows as one R object may be unnecessary. marcxml_to_parquet() writes the same schema to a directory of Parquet files while keeping the expanded canonical data bounded by processing batches.

Arrow support is optional. Install it when needed:

install.packages("arrow")

The bundled example can be converted to Parquet with:

parquet_dir <- tempfile()

marcxml_to_parquet(
  source_xml,
  output_dir = parquet_dir,
  workers = 1L,
  verbose = FALSE
)

catalogue <- arrow::open_dataset(parquet_dir)

catalogue |>
  summarise(rows = n()) |>
  collect()
#> # A tibble: 1 × 1
#>    rows
#>   <int>
#> 1    16

The dataset can be filtered and aggregated with Arrow and dplyr before a smaller result is collected into R:

catalogue |>
  filter(tag == "650", subfield_code == "a") |>
  count(value, sort = TRUE) |>
  collect()

For a catalogue already split across several files:

files <- sort(Sys.glob("data/catalogue/*.xml"))

marcxml_to_parquet(
  files,
  output_dir = "catalogue_parquet",
  workers = 4L
)

When several input files are converted together, record_id values are assigned in deterministic input-file order and remain globally contiguous across the logical dataset.

For one MARCXML file, the optimized sequential path is the natural starting point and additional worker processes may be slower. Parallel execution is more naturally useful when substantial independent files can be assigned to separate workers.

How the two storage workflows are implemented

The in-memory and Parquet workflows use the same logical representation and, for supported ordinary MARCXML, the same package-specific compiled parser. The important difference is how much of the expanded canonical representation is materialized at one time.

The optimized sequential parser is implemented in C on top of libxml2 and uses two passes over the input. The first pass determines how many canonical rows each selected record will produce. The second pass allocates the required output vectors at their final size and fills them directly while traversing the MARC structure in source order.

For read_marcxml(), the second pass materializes the complete selected result as one tibble. For marcxml_to_parquet(), successive groups of complete records are materialized and written as Parquet parts, so the complete expanded table does not have to exist as one R object. The record remains the natural processing unit because its Leader, fields and subfields must remain structurally coherent.

The same principle applies in the other direction. write_marcxml() can write an in-memory canonical table directly, while Arrow-backed canonical data can be scanned incrementally without first collecting the complete Dataset into one R tibble. Structural relationships are reconstructed from record_id, field_order and subfield_order; the occurrence columns remain analytical coordinates rather than the authoritative source of serialization order.

Readers who want the lower-level details of the libxml2 reader/writer, two-pass allocation, bounded Arrow scans and retained reference implementations can continue with Technical implementation and performance.

Parallel execution in practice

workers = 1L is the default and should normally be the starting point for a single MARCXML file. With one file, requesting multiple workers requires a worker-safe record-based execution path and adds process creation, task coordination and data-transfer overhead. Once the sequential parser itself is fast, those costs can outweigh the available parallel work.

A catalogue already divided into several substantial MARCXML files is a more natural parallel workload. Complete files can be assigned to separate workers, while each worker retains the optimized sequential parser internally. Before multi-file conversion begins, marcxmlr assigns deterministic, non-overlapping record_id ranges from input-file order, so worker completion order does not change the logical record identities in the resulting Dataset.

This is a practical recommendation rather than a universal threshold: CPU, memory, storage, compression, file layout and record complexity all matter. Benchmark representative input before relying on additional workers.

Performance scale for version 0.3.1

The following measurements are included to indicate scale, not to promise performance on other systems. They were obtained with marcxmlr 0.3.1 on a Lenovo ThinkPad P50 with an Intel Core i7-6820HQ, 31.18 GiB RAM and a local SSD, using R 4.6.1 and Arrow 25.0.1.

The single-file parallel measurements are also a useful warning against assuming that more workers are automatically faster: the same 40,000-record Parquet conversion took 19.858 s with two workers and 18.849 s with four, compared with 9.374 s sequentially. Across the 27-file corpus, by contrast, four workers reduced elapsed time from 290.139 s to 118.629 s.

Detailed benchmark methodology, memory measurements and implementation context are provided in Technical implementation and performance.

Scope and further documentation

marcxmlr deliberately separates faithful structural representation from later interpretation. It does not attempt to:

• repair cataloguing records;
• infer missing fields or subfields;
• normalize different cataloguing practices;
• collapse repeated values on behalf of the analyst;
• automatically map a catalogue to another metadata model; or
• replace complete MARC 21 content or MARCXML schema validation.

Its job is narrower: represent supported MARCXML faithfully enough that later selection, reshaping, validation, mapping and analysis are explicit choices made with ordinary R tools.

For further reading:

• Workflow vignette — a shorter executable read → inspect/query → diagnose → write → Parquet walkthrough. After installing a package build that includes the vignette, it can also be opened with browseVignettes("marcxmlr").
• Technical implementation and performance — optional deeper reading on compiled parsing, bounded-memory processing, Arrow-backed writing, parallel execution, validation internals and benchmark methodology.

The README and vignette are intended to be sufficient for using the package. The technical note is supplementary material for readers who want to understand how the computational paths are implemented and evaluated.

The implementation principle is the same throughout: preserve the MARC structure first, then simplify or optimize without changing the logical data model.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
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