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]