Terry,

Here's an idea for a new feature for MarcEdit.  A common use for MarcEdit is to prepare and load large batches of records from a vendor, such as e-books.  Unfortunately, some vendors do not provide update files--instead, they edit their full load file.  Subscribers to these services are often forced to delete the old records and reload the entire file whenever the vendor makes an update.  So, what if MarcEdit could provide a list of the records that are changed?

The best solution that I can think of is a tool which takes two input files and produces three output files:

A file of records that exist in file 1 but not in file 2 (deletes).
A file of records which exist in file 2 but not in file 1 (adds).
A file of records from file 2 that are changed from their counterparts in file 1 (changes).

This would obviously have to be based on a standard number, or perhaps title, like the Merge or Deduplication tools.  I imagine this would be somewhat more difficult than Merge, though, since you have to actually compare potential duplicates.  Even just a list of record ids in each of the three categories would be useful.  Right now, I can come up with a method to find which records are unique to file 1 or to file 2, but I don't think there is a way to find which records are in both but are changed.

					Steve McDonald
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