WorldCat API: draft ruby gem

Since the WorldCat Grid API became available, I’ve spent odd periods of time playing with the services to see what kinds of things I could do and not do with the information being made available.  This was partly due to a desire to create an open source version of WorldCat Local.  It wouldn’t have been functionally complete (lacking facets, some data, etc), but it would be good enough, most likely, for folks wanting to switch to a catalog interface that utilized WorldCat as their source database, rather than their local ILS dbs.  And while the project was pretty much completed, the present service terms the are attached to the API make this type of work out of bounds at present (though, I knew that when I started — it was more experimental with the hope that by the time I was finished, the API would be more open). 

Anyway…as part of the process, I started working on some rudimentary components for ruby to make processing the OCLC provided data easier.  Essentially, creating a handful of convenience functions that would make it much easier to call and utilize that data the grid services provided — my initial component was called wcapi. 

Tomorrow (or this morning if you are in Providence), a few folks from OCLC will be putting on a preconference related to the OCLC API at Code4Lib.  There, folks from OCLC will be giving some background and insight into the development of API, as well as looking at how the API works and some sample code snippets.  I’d hoped to be there (I’m signed up), but an airline snafu has me stranded in transit until tomorrow — so by the time I get to Providence, all of, or most of the pre-conference will be over.  Too bad, I know.  Fortunately, there will be someone else from Oregon State in the audience, so I should be able to get some notes.

However, there’s no reason why I can’t participate, even while Iâ€?m jetting towards Providence — and so I submit my wcapi gem/code to the preconference folks to use however they see fit.  It doesn’t have a rakefile or docs, but once you install the gem, there is a test.rb file in the wcapi folder that demonstrates how to use all the functions.  The wrapper functions accept the same values as the API — and like the API, you need to have your OCLC developer’s key to make it work.  The wcapi gem will utilize libxml for most xml processing (if it’s on your machine, otherwise it will downgrade to rexml), save for a handful of functions that done use named namespaces within the resultset (this confuses libxml for some reason — though their is a way around it, I just didn’t have the time to add it). 

So, the gem/code can be found at: wcapi.tar.gz.  Since I’ll likely make use of this in the future, I’ll likely move this to source forge in the near future.

*******Example OpenSearch Call*******

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘wcapi’

client = WCAPI::Client.new :wskey => ‘[insert_your_own_key_here’

response = client.OpenSearch(:q=>’civil war’, :format=>’atom’, :start => ‘1’, :count => ’25’, :cformat => ‘mla’)

puts "Total Results: " + response.header["totalResults"]
response.records.each {|rec|
  puts "Title: " + rec[:title] + "\n"
  puts "URL: " + rec[:link] + "\n"
  puts "OCLC #: " + rec[:id] + "\n"
  puts "Description: " + rec[:summary] + "\n"
  puts "citation: " + rec[:citation] + "\n"

}

********End Sample Call****************

And that’s it.  Pretty straightforward.  So, I hope that everyone has a great pre-conference.  I wish that I was there (and with some luck, I may catch the 2nd half) — but if not, I’ll see everyone in Providence Monday evening.

–TR