Tim,
It sounds like you want to be able to search on standard identifiers and
are frustrated that the Internet Archive's access doesn't allow it
(although it looks like they do have an ISBN search)? And I'm curious,
why would you want or need to pull down only records that have OCLC
numbers of ISBNs in particular? What is it you need to do that makes
only those records useful?
Like Karen and Bess and others have said, I recommend that you
coordinate this with the Open Library project. At the meeting last
Friday, it did sound like they would be interested in providing
identifier disambiguation types of service - give them an ISBN, and
they'll give you the records associated with it.
Also, there was discussion about building an Open Librar yAPI (to enable
some cool integration with wikipedia), and I suggested a that libraries
using an API would want the search results to include information about
whether the title has a digitized copy. So I would hope the service that
you're envisioning is something that would be provided by an Open
Library API (but we don't know when that might come about).
As OCA moves forward, folks may well be digitizing identical books. So
there may not be a one to one relationship between unique catalog
identifier, unique oca identifier, and isbn/lccn/oclc number.
-emily
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 08:47:04 -0500
From: Tim Shearer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: musing on oca apiRe: [CODE4LIB] oca api?
Howdy folks,
I've been playing and thinking. I'd like to have what amounts to a unique
identifier index to oca digitized texts. I want to be able to pull all the
records that have oclc numbers, issns, isbns, etc. I want it to be
lightweight, fast, searchable.
Would anyone else want/use such a thing?
I'm thinking about building something like this.
If I do, it would be ideal if wouldn't be a duplication of effort, so anyone
got this in the works? And if it would meet the needs of others.
My basic notion is to crawl the site (starting with "americana", the American
Libraries. Pull the oca unique identifier (e.g. northcarolinayea1910rale) and
associate it with
unique identifiers (oclc numbers, issns, isbns, lc numbers)
contributing institution's alias and unique catalog identifier
upload date
That's all I was thinking of. Then there's what you might be able to do with
it:
Give me all the oca unique identifiers that have oclc numbers
Give me all the oca unique identifiers with isbns that were
uploaded between x and y date
Give me the oca unique identifier for this oclc number
Planning to do:
keep crawling it and keep it up to date.
Things I wasn't planning to do:
worry about other unique ids (you'd have to go to xISBN or
ThingISBN yourself)
worry about storing anything else from oca.
It would be good for being able to add an 856 to matches in your catalog. It
would not be good for grabbing all marc records for all of oca.
Anyhow, is this duplication of effort? Would you like something like this?
What else would you like it to do (keeping in mind this is an unfunded pet
project)? How would you want to talk to it? I was thinking of a web service,
but hadn't thought too much about how to query it or how I'd deliver results.
Of course I'm being an idiot and trying out new tools at the same time (python
to see what the buzz is all about, sqlite just to learn it (it may not work
out)).
Thoughts? Vicious criticism?
-t
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 11:05:41 -0500
From: Jodi Schneider <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: musing on oca apiRe: [CODE4LIB] oca api?
Great idea, Tim!
The open library tech list that Bess mentions is [EMAIL PROTECTED],
described at
http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech
-Jodi
Jodi Schneider
Science Library Specialist
Amherst College
413-542-2076
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 08:32:43 -0800
From: Karen Coyle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: musing on oca apiRe: [CODE4LIB] oca api?
We talked about something like this at the Open Library meeting last
Friday. The ol list is [EMAIL PROTECTED] (join at
http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-lib). I think of
this as a (or one or more) translate service between IDs. It's a
realization that we will never have a unique ID that everyone agrees on,
that most bibliographic items are really more than one thing, but that
since we have data about the bibliographic item we have many
opportunities to make connections even though people have used different
identifiers. So we could use an "ID-switcher" to move among data stores
and services. Is that the kind of thing you are thinking of?
kc
--
Emily Lynema
Systems Librarian for Digital Projects
Information Technology, NCSU Libraries
919-513-8031
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
