Dan Scott wrote:
>> I'm very curious: Are there catalogs with similar APIs which are
open to
> everyone?
>
> Yes, indeed. Take a look at the Evergreen open source library system
> (http://open-ils.org), which follows the unAPI specification
> (http://unAPI.info) for offering alternative representations of the
> underlying MARC21 records in MARC21XML, several flavours of Dublin
> Core, MODS, HTML, RSS, and Atom.
Thanks for the hint. But obviously this is not a search API. You first
have to retrieve the record-number with a seperate catalog-search to get
the data you want, don't you? So this API isn't as rich as the
WorldCat-API.
In the meantime, I found out that the Open-Data-Projects Open Library
(http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api) and ‡biblios.net
(https://bws.biblios.net/doku.php) got an open search- and retrieve-
API. The biblios-API even let's you write into the database.
I would like to know: Are there any more library-catalogs with an open
API? Isn't that a way to increase the importance of catalogs and get
them connected to the web? Other applications (I'm thinking of emerging
webbased research-, publication- and scholarly-communication-tools)
could reuse the data and on their part provide data for mashups in
catalogs.
Adrian
Received on Mon Mar 09 2009 - 06:12:30 EDT