So, one of the presentations at Code4Lib this year discussed one of the latest initiatives to come out of the LibLime company, ‡biblios.net. ‡biblios.net is a repository of ~30 million MARC records released under an Open Data license.
From my perspective, one of the things that I found most interesting about the ‡biblios.net platform is the support for developers. ‡biblios.net provides a very simple to use push/pull data model over simple HTTP. It’s something that I’ve been interested in taking a look at for a little while and after chatting with Joshua Ferraro after his session, decided to see how difficult it would be to actually work with this service.
So, I decided to create a plug-in. Much in the same way MarcEdit has a Connexion batch editing plug-in, I created a ‡biblios.net helper plug-in. I’ll make the plug-in available for download with the next version of MarcEdit through the Plugin Manager (so, likely when I get back from Code4Lib), but have posted the source code (in C#) and a short youtube video for folks wanting to see how it works.
While I’m not sure if ‡biblios.net will catch on as a service, I’m very impressed by LibLime’s effort to create a large, shared cataloging database that comes with a set of API to allow developers the ability to integrate directly with it. Hopefully, OCLC will follow LibLime’s lead and eventually add push functionality integration for WorldCat — allowing membership and library developers an opportunity to develop their own cataloging interfaces to the resource. Until then…
Youtube video (I think youtube has finished processing it — if note, check back):
C# Source code: biblios_net.zip
–TR