Man, I figured it was there somewhere I just didn't know it.
If it's really not there, can we like start a campaign to convince LC
that part of maintaining the MARC vocabularies is making them available
at a persistent URL, in machine-readable fashion, updated and maintained
by them as vocabularies change.
Or else, how is any software supposed to use them? Counting on
developers to manually review notices of update and manually update
local lists is inefficient and entirely unrealistic.
On 6/22/2011 5:57 PM, Kyle Banerjee wrote:
I went through a process similar to what you describe sometime back for a
tool I made (i.e. I could find no easily downloadable info). You can
download something that will be easier to parse from
http://calculate.alptown.com/gac.js
It's probably not 100% accurate as I haven't downloaded for quite awhile.
But catalogers have me correct errors they discover and there are about 800
unique visitors per day so I assume they notice most things.
It would be nice if this kind of data could be provided in a straightforward
format.
kyle
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 2:44 PM, Jonathan Rochkind<[email protected]> wrote:
Can anyone remind me if there's a machine readable copy of the MARC
geographic codes available at any persistent URL?
They're in HTML at
http://www.loc.gov/marc/**geoareas/gacs_code.html<http://www.loc.gov/marc/geoareas/gacs_code.html>.
I actually had a script that automatically downloaded from there and
"scraped" the HTML -- but sometime since I wrote the script, the HTML
structure on the page changed and it broke.
(I kind of thought that was unlikely since that HTML page itself was
machine generated -- but I guess they changed the software that generated
it. Certainly I knew that scraping HTML was a bad thing to rely on... which
is why I hope LC provides this in some format less likely to change?)
