Quoting Jonathan Rochkind <[email protected]>:
Can anyone remind me if there's a machine readable copy of the MARC
geographic codes available at any persistent URL?
Not sure how persistent, but here's Ross's version:
http://marccodes.heroku.com/gacs/
I often made the point at MARBI meetings (before I just gave up going
to them) that all of MARC (tags, subfields, codes) should be available
in a machine-readable form.[1] I go NUTS when I see those email
notices come around, the idea that all over the world people are
manually keying in codes into a local table. Please help us make sure
that does not happen in any future formats!!!! Make noise now!
kc
[1] The result was that a few meetings later LC announced that they
had coded the MARC online pages in XML, and were generating the HTML
from that. I think I was mis-understood.
They're in HTML at 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?)
--
Karen Coyle
[email protected] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
