I wrote a little script to help a friend get a catalog
set up for his books, and I'm wondering if it would be
useful to anyone else, and if so, where I should put
it.
It works as a proxy server that runs on the local
machine: The way I've been using it is to have two
windows open in my browser. In the first I search the
LoC catalog until I find the information I want. The
second has a fake url which the proxy recognizes, and
instead of forwarding it on, responds with a page that
contains a 'grab' button, and any messages from the
script. Clicking on the button tells the script to
scrape marc data from the last page requested,
reformat parts of it, and export it to our catalog
database.
Much of it is rather idiosyncratic, so I'm not sure
how generally useful it would be: This is on an older
mac, and so the proxy server part of it is
non-forking. I've concatenated some fields, and split
others, but if you wanted the marc data straight it
should be easy enough to cut out the parts that do the
reformatting. The data is going into FileMaker, and so
I'm using Mac::Glue, rather than DBI or something more
portable.
So I guess I'm wondering whether something like this
is likely to be useful to other people, and if so what
I should do with it so that they could find it.
Probably reply off list, unless you think it'd be
better otherwise. Thanks, sorry to be a bother.
=====
-- Chuck McCallum
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
