Since last December, I’ve had the opportunity to spend a good deal of time working with the OCLC WorldCat Metadata API. The focus was primarily around kicking the tires, and then eventually developing some integration components with MarcEdit, as well as a C# library (https://github.com/reeset/oclc_api) for those that may have use of such things.
However, most folks in libraries tend to not use C# — they tend to focus on lighter-weight languages like ruby, python, or PHP. Well, I work in ruby as well, so I decided to take the C# library and port it to Ruby. The resulting code can be found here: https://github.com/reeset/wc_metadata_api
It’s pretty straightforward — and provides wrappers for all the current functionality found in the API, with the caveat being that the defined transfer format between OCLC and the client is in MARCXML, and response formats are in application/atom+xml. The API supports a handful of other formats, but I’ve standardized on MARCXML since it’s well understood and there are lots of tools that can work with it.
The code isn’t well commented at this point. I’ll take some time over the next few days to add some commenting, improve exception handling, and possibly add a few helper functions to make message processing easier — but this should help anyone interested in knowing how the API works get a better understanding.
–tr
Code Example:
** Get Local Bib Record
require ‘rubygems’
require ‘wc_metadata_api’
key = ‘[your key]’
secret = ‘[your secret]’
principalid = ‘[your principal_id]’
principaldns = ‘[your principal_idns]’
schema = ‘LibraryOfCongress’
holdingLibraryCode='[your holding code]’
instSymbol = ‘[your oclc symbol]’
client = WC_METADATA_API::Client.new(:wskey => key, :secret => secret, :principalID => principalid, :principalDNS => principaldns, :debug =>false)
response = client.WorldCatReadLocalBibRecord(:oclcNumber =>’338544583′, :schema => schema, :holdingLibraryCode => holdingLibraryCode, :instSymbol => instSymbol)
puts response