Thanks very much Dan and Karen. All this is very helpful. This is a small-scale project for the National Humanities Center (http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ ). They have about 40 fellows in residence who request books and other materials of the in-house library staff, who then find these materials for them from local libraries or further afield as necessary. As part of NHC’s service to the resident fellows they provide them with an MLA formatted bibliography at the end of their tenure. My idea was to build into a new request and tracking system a function whereby they could by inputting the ISBN or OCLC number get the data required for citations. I’ve since found another API from EasyBib which formats the citation so maybe after having gotten the necessary data from OL or OCLC I would make a call to EasyBib’s API and store the formatted citation in our database. This is the general idea. Very few transactions involved, much less than 100/day I’d think. From the article Dan cited it sounds like the OL API may be the best approach but for the comment “the dataset is small, inconsistent, error-prone, and no longer being maintained”. Completeness I’d think would be a big issue here as I’d expect these advanced humanities scholars would at least sometimes be dealing with somewhat obscure materials.
From: Ol-tech [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dan Scott Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2014 9:41 AM To: Karen Coyle; Open Library -- technical discussion Subject: Re: [ol-tech] How to get bilbiographic data using OCLC On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 9:30 AM, Karen Coyle <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Thanks, Dan. Remember: if you are not from an OCLC member institution, there are limitations on the API. As I recall, less bibliographic data is returned from the open API. OpenLibrary is open, so all of the data is available. Yep, that's why I said the metadata returned from the OCLC xID service "might barely work for your needs", and the API limits are 1000 calls per day per IP address. So, depending on how many citations David needs to create, whether he is working with a library that is an OCLC cataloguing member (and can navigate the several different OCLC accounts and the API limit increase request process to bump the limit to 10,000/day), and how rich the resulting citations need to be, it may or may not work for his purposes. Perhaps a combination of both to fill in the respective gaps might work. Oh! And the article "Comparing the LibraryThing, OCLC, and Open Library ISBN APIs" (http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8715) might be of interest, too. It's about a year and a half old, so some things might have changed, but includes examples of the OpenLibrary query API as well. Anyway, the examples and the links to the full docs for both the OCLC and OpenLibrary APIs are all there. I'm interested in finding out what direction David decides to take.
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