Re: Open Catalog APIs was: opac live search

From: Mark Jordan <mjordan_at_nyob>
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 09:33:10 -0700
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Hi Adrian,

Evergreen implements SRU and Z39.50 as search protocols.

Mark

Mark Jordan
Head of Library Systems
W.A.C. Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 1S6, Canada
Voice: 778.782.5753 / Fax: 778.782.3023
mjordan_at_sfu.ca


----- "Adrian Pohl" <pohl_at_HBZ-NRW.DE> wrote:

> 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 - 12:35:36 EDT