talking about steal this library

who?

my name is caleb and i’m a librarian. i’m also a library patron, and i use rss feeds. i’d like the library to offer rss feeds of new acquisitions, but it’s out of the scope of my job to make it happen. so, i’m making it happen on my own time as a citizen and patron.

why not share it with the world? perhaps if enough of us use rss feeds for library acquisitions, libraries will be convinced that they should provide them - i’m sure whatever the library can put together would be better than what i’ve hacked together here.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2006 at 5:36 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “who?”

tedmcclure Says:
July 6th, 2006 at 12:40 am
This is a great concept. Can you point me in the right direction for learning how to format this kind of feed (schema, DTD, stuff like that)?
superpatron Says:
July 7th, 2006 at 5:38 am
any chance you can add ann arbor?

they have an RSS feed, but you should be able to get it just from the acquistion numbers, which run with URLs something like this

http://www.aadl.org/cat/seek/record=1267500

or with an easy-to-parse version like so

http://www.aadl.org/cat/rest/record/1267500

thanks

Ed
calebtr Says:
July 7th, 2006 at 8:23 pm
hi

sorry about the comment moderation. i thought i had set things up to let registered users post, but i’m obviously missing something.

as far as the schema/dtd for the feeds being produced, they are rss 2.0 -> http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification. i’m not so into reading standards and specifications as i am trying out code and seeing if it works. can you be more specific about what you want to know?

as far as ann arbor, i think we can work it out - i don’t want to have different routines to crawl different libraries, so i’m thinking i can build in an xslt step before parsing the records for ISBN (to match amazon/loc) and display.

of course, you already *have* feeds for ann arbor booklists - lucky!

summer is when i spend less time working on silly things on the computer, so give me a few weeks. i also need to put in better error handling.
mikeybe Says:
July 12th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
Can you give me some general information regarding how you obtain the amazon book covers using the amazon api?

Also, are there any copyright issues associated with this?

Thanks,
Mike
calebtr Says:
July 12th, 2006 at 10:42 pm
First I went to Amazon.com Web Services and signed up as a developer and received a developer token, which you send as part of your query to Amazon.

The site provides tons of information about their API. There are also books, and I tried to browse them at my library, but they were all checked out.

Typically, Web Services means you are sending http requests to query a remote database, and, also typically, the result is XML. I learned the format of the Amazon XML by sending queries and scrutinizing the XML results.

I also learned by example by playing with an Amazon plug-in for WordPress, WP-Amazon.

I ended up using Perl and the SOAP::Amazon module to query Amazon. I use another Perl module, XML::Simple to parse out the image URL. I’m not a great coder, but it works well enough for a few hundred queries a day.

Amazon’s XML includes links to small, medium and large book jackets. The catch is, if you use their data, you have to link back to Amazon (and not necessarily to that specific item, though you could make money that way). If you look at the feeds on this site, you’ll see each image is a link to the Amazon.com home page.

So no, there aren’t any copyright issues with using Amazon.com’s book jackets. I don’t know if there are copyright issues with using library records, but I hope not, for all of our sakes.

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who?

5 Responses to “who?”

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