About 1/3 of the 1M ebooks on OpenLibrary.org have full MARC records,
and you can retrieve the record via the API. There is also a "secret"
record format that returns not the full MARC for the hard copy (which is
what the records represent because these are digitized books) but a
record that has been modified to represent the ebook.
The MARC records for the hard copy follow the pattern:
https://archive.org/download/[archive identifier]/[archive
identifier]_marc.[xml|mrc]
Download MARC XML
https://archive.org/download/myantonia00cathrich/myantonia00cathrich_marc.xml
Download MARC binary
https://www.archive.org/download/myantonia00cathrich/myantonia00cathrich_meta.mrc
<https://archive.org/download/myantonia00cathrich/myantonia00cathrich_meta.mrc>
To get the one that represents the ebook, do:
https://archive.org/download/[archive identifier]/[archive
identifier]_archive_marc.xml
https://archive.org/download/myantonia00cathrich/myantonia00cathrich_archive_marc.xml
This one has an 007, the 245 $h, and a few other things.
Tom Morris did some code that helps you search for books by author and
title and retrieve a MARC record. I don't recall where his github
archive is, but I'll find out and post it here. The code is open source.
We used it for a project that added ebook records to a public library
catalog.
You can also use the OPenLibrary API to select all open access ebooks.
What I'd like to see is a way to create a list or bibliography in OL
that then is imported into a program that will find MARC records for
those books. The list function is still under development, though.
kc
On 8/18/14, 3:04 PM, Stuart Yeates wrote:
There are a stack of great free ebook repositories available on the
web, things like https://unglue.it/ http://www.gutenberg.org/
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page http://www.gutenberg.net.au/
https://www.smashwords.com/books/category/1/newest/0/free/any etc, etc
What there doesn't appear to be, is high-quality AACR2 / RDA records
available for these. There are things like
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/meta/pg/ which are elaborate dublin
core to MARC converters, but these lack standardisation of names,
authority control (people, entities, places, etc), interlinking, etc.
It seems to me that quality metadata would greatly increase the value
/ findability / use of these projects and thus their visibility and
available sources.
Are there any projects working in this space already? Are there
suitable tools available?
cheers
stuart
--
Karen Coyle
kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
m: +1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600
