My guess is that, yes, the query interface we've been discussing here
and the 'all sorts of interfaces that none of us knew about' are the
same. It's not documented that I'm aware of. We've found out about it
by literally sitting next to IA developers and asking questions.
Chris
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
Jonathan Rochkind
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2008 12:18 PM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] oca api?
So in answer to my question here at the Code4Lib conference, after
Brewster's keynote, Brewster suggests there are all sorts of interfaces
that none of us knew about. Or at least I didn't know about, and haven't
been able to figure out in months of trying! I'm going to try and
corner him and ask for an email of who we should contact.
Perhaps it's the XML interface that you guys know about already. Is that
documented anywhere? How the heck did you find out about it?
Jonathan
Steve Toub <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 02/25/08 9:41 PM >>>
I'll add that when IA told me about
http://www.archive.org/services/search.php interface to return
XML, they asked that we not send more than 100 records at time since
doing more would adversely
affect production services. Which made it seem like OAI-PMH was a better
way to go.
Chris, can you explain a bit more about what this means: "We found their
OAI interface to pull
scanned items inconsistently based on date of scanning...."? I'm having
trouble parsing.
--SET
--- Chris Freeland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Jonathan - No, I don't believe it's documented - at least not anywhere
publicly. If any IA/OCA folks are lurking, here's an opportunity to
make a bunch of techies happy...
Chris
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of
Jonathan Rochkind
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 2:48 PM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] oca api?
I hadn't known this "custom query interface" existed! This is welcome
news. Is this documented anywhere?
Jonathan
Chris Freeland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 02/25/08 2:51 PM >>>
Steve & Tim,
I'm the tech director for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL),
which
is a consortium of 10 natural history libraries who have partnered
with
Internet Archive (IA)/OCA for scanning our collections. We've just
launched our revamped portal, complete with more than 7,500 books &
2.8
million pages scanned by IA & other digitization partners, at:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org
To build this portal we ingest metadata from IA. We found their OAI
interface to pull scanned items inconsistently based on date of
scanning, so we switched to using their custom query interface.
Here's
an example of a query we fire off:
http://www.archive.org/services/search.php?query=collection:(biodiversit
y)+AND+updatedate:%5b2007-10-31+TO+2007-11-30%5d+AND+-contributor:(MBLWH
OI%20Library)&limit=10&submit=submit
This is returning scanned items from the "biodiversity" collection,
updated between 10/31/2007 - 11/30/2007, restricted to one of our
contributing libraries (MBLWHOI Library), and limited to 10 results.
The results are styled in the browser; view source to see the good
stuff. We use this list to grab the identifiers we've yet to ingest.
Some background: When a book is scanned through IA/OCA scanning, they
create their own unique identifier (like "annalesacademiae21univ") and
grab a MARC record from the contributing library's catalog. All of
the
scanned files, derivatives, and metadata files are stored on IA's
clusters in a directory named with the identifier.
Steve mentioned using their /details/ directive, then sniffing the
page
to get the cluster location and the files for downloading. An easier
method is to use their /download/ directive, as in:
http://www.archive.org/download/ID$, or in the example above:
http://www.archive.org/download/annalesacademiae21univ
That automatically does a lookup on the cluster, which means you don't
have to scrape info off pages. You can also address any files within
that directory, as in:
http://www.archive.org/download/annalesacademiae21univ/annalesacademiae2
1univ_marc.xml
The only way to get standard identifiers (ISBN, ISSN, OCLC, LCCN) for
these scanned books is to grab them out of the MARC record. So the
long-winded answer to your question, Tim, is no, there's no simple way
to crossref what IA has scanned with your catalog - THAT I KNOW OF.
Big
caveat on that last part.
Happy to help with any other questions I can,
Chris Freeland
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of
Steve Toub
Sent: Sunday, February 24, 2008 11:20 PM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] oca api?
--- Tim Shearer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Folks,
I'm looking into tapping the texts in the Open Content Alliance.
A few questions...
As near as I can tell, they don't expose (perhaps even store?) any
common
unique identifiers (oclc number, issn, isbn, loc number).
I poked around in this world a few months ago in my previous job at
California Digital Library,
also an OCA partner.
The unique key seems to be text string identifier (one that seems to
be
completely different from
the text string identifier in Open Library). Apparently there was talk
at the last partner meeting
about moving to ISBNs:
http://dilettantes.code4lib.org/2007/10/22/tales-from-the-open-content-a
lliance/
To obtain identifiers in bulk, I think the recommended approach is the
OAI-PMH interface, which
seems more reliable in recent months:
http://www.archive.org/services/oai.php?verb=Identify
http://www.archive.org/services/oai.php?verb=ListIdentifiers&metadataPre
fix=oai_dc&set=collection:cdl
etc.
Additional instructions if you want to grab the content files.
From any book's metadata page (e.g.,
http://www.archive.org/details/chemicallecturee00newtrich)
click through on the "Usage Rights: See Terms" link; the rights are on
a
pane on the left-hand
side.
Once you know the identifier, you can grab the content files, using
this
syntax:
http://www.archive.org/details/$ID
Like so:
http://www.archive.org/details/chemicallecturee00newtrich
And then sniff the page to find the FTP link:
ftp://ia340915.us.archive.org/2/items/chemicallecturee00newtrich
But I think they prefer to use HTTP for these, not the FTP, so switch
this to:
http://ia340915.us.archive.org/2/items/chemicallecturee00newtrich
Hope this helps!
--SET
We're a contributer so I can use curl to grab our records via http
(and
regexp my way to our local catalog identifiers, which they do
store/expose).
I've played a bit with the z39.50 interface at indexdata
(http://www.indexdata.dk/opencontent/), but I'm not confident about
the
content behind it. I get very limited results, for instance I can't
find
any UNC records and we're fairly new to the game.
Again, I'm looking for unique identifiers in what I can get back and
it's
slim pickings.
Anyone cracked this nut? Got any life lessons for me?
Thanks!
Tim
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Tim Shearer
Web Development Coordinator
The University Library
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
919-962-1288
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
