Re: ethics of screenscraping library opacs?

From: Stefano Bargioni <bargioni_at_nyob>
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2021 11:32:20 +0100
To: CODE4LIB_at_LISTS.CLIR.ORG
My policy: contact the library manager LM and ask for the pace to use.
Even better: use library dumps or ask to periodically publish the data you need, so to be compliant with the 3rd star of the semantic web.
This will avoid any scraping :-)
No way to contact the LM? Try with a very slow pace, then reduce the delay while querying the opac itself, to see if its performance is affected by your scrape.
Bye. Stefano

> On 25 Nov 2021, at 20:54, M Belvadi <mbelvadi_at_GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> Hi, all.
> 
> What do you all think about code that screenscapes (eg python's Beautiful
> Soup) library opacs?
> Is it ok to do?
> Ok if it's throttled to a specific rate of hits per minute?
> Ok, if throttled AND is a really big library system where the load might
> not be relatively significant?
> 
> Not entirely unrelated, is there an API for the new University of
> California Library Search system?
> 
> 
> Melissa Belvadi
> mbelvadi_at_gmail.com
> 
Received on Fri Nov 26 2021 - 05:22:34 EST