Oxford coming up; Librarians suggest libraries
Stay tuned for Oxford University's collection, coming on line later today or tomorrow. Then I'll start bringing other Z39.50 libraries on fairly quickly, in order of user interest, connection speed and record parseability (I'm trying to do everything with Marc records now). Oh, and they need to be open to anyone and available all the time. The Z39.50 world is fairly new to me, but there are apparently thousands of people involved in it.
If you're a librarian and know what the heck I'm talking about, feel free to suggest candidates. For starters I'd like to add some large US university libraries, to fall back on when the LC is slow. Oh, and I need a shoulder to cry on: Marc21 is blithering nonsense!
If you're a librarian and know what the heck I'm talking about, feel free to suggest candidates. For starters I'd like to add some large US university libraries, to fall back on when the LC is slow. Oh, and I need a shoulder to cry on: Marc21 is blithering nonsense!
posted by Tim at 8:00 AM
21 Comments:
May I suggest the University of California library system, Melvyl (http://melvyl.cdlib.org/)? I use it all the time. It's far better than LoC both for English and, particularly, foreign language books.
The European Library (http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org) claims to link to 44 national libraries, though it is still beta, but may be interesting.
National libraries I have used succcessfuly:
Australia (http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/)
Austria (http://aleph.onb.ac.at/)
Belgium (http://opac.kbr.be/)
Canada (http://amicus.collectionscanada.ca/)
France (http://catalogue.bnf.fr/servlet/AccueilConnecte)
Germany(http://dispatch.opac.ddb.de/)
Ireland (http://hip.nli.ie)
Italy (http://opac.sbn.it)
Spain (http://www.bne.es)
Many of them have English interfaces
What's Marc21?
Well, I should say any Marc record (a kind of library record that's supposed to be read by machines).
Here's a simple example:
001 UkOxUb10666194
003 UkOxU
005 19980624125721.0
008 500101r19921955enk 000 1 eng d
020 $a 185715133X
082 $a 813.54 $2 20
092 $a D0500751370
100 1 $a Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, $d 1899-1977.
245 10 $a Lolita / $c Vladimir Nabokov
260 $a London : $b David Campbell, $c 1992
300 $a xxix, 329 p ; $c 21 cm
440 0 $a Everyman's library ; $v 133
500 $a First published: 1955
504 $a Bibliography p.xxv
852 $a UkOxU $b Bodleian $b BOD Bookstack $h M93.F01795 $7 14202119 $p 500751380 $y In place $5 500751380 $9 14202119
852 $a UkOxU $b Brasenose $b BNC Main Libr $h F/ZSN 11 $7 14202118 $p 302361401 $y MISSING
852 $a UkOxU $b Wolfson Coll. $b WOL Main Libr $h 823 NAB $7 14202117 $p 300671956 $y Please check shelf
This wheel has been invented 100 times, but something very lightweight, in PHP and without a viral license eludes me. Besides, it's weirdly fun.
Can you hack/convert one of the Perl modules that does MARC, perhaps? when I played with this stuff (years ago), that's what I used.
Also might want to search around the web, as Jon Udell did a bookmarklet for working with these catalogs a year or two ago. I don't have the info handy, but it should be easy to find; if not, drop me a line and I'll look around.
How about the National Diet Library of Japan? Here's a link to the English OPAC. I ran an ISBN search on one of my Japanese books and it came up nicely, though I had to used the advanced search page for it.
http://opac.ndl.go.jp/index_e.html
Including the Bodleian is good, but because of the weird nature of UK copyright libraries it's incomplete; bringing on the British Library (which has a decent z39.50 connection, IIRC) or the NLS or one of the other large UK deposit libraries is probably worthwhile in addition to Oxford. (There's five - Oxford, Cambridge, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, and the British Library, plus Trinity College Dublin in .ie)
Have you looked at COPAC? It crosschecks a wide number of UK libraries via z39.50...
(Incidentally, if you think MARC21 is bad, you should see the various MARC standards that preceded it - it's like trying to write a novel in Fortran IV!)
I forgot to mention my favourite ISBN hack - Wikipedia's Booksources page, which deeplinks to a huge number of online library catalogues, with the relevant search, if you feed it a specific ISBN. Not that much use for what you're doing, but a pretty nice resource if only for the collection of catalogues.
UVA is also a deposit library and should be a good backup to LoC. I don't know about its accessibility, but I believe HouseholdOpera works there. You might contact her.
This may have been suggested before, and it seems the most patently obvious to me, but how about WorldCAT (OCLC)? It would have almost anything anyone would want.
Don't discount the usefulness of large public libraries (NYPL, Chicago, LA). They have large research collections, but also collect more popular works than do academic institutions.
Also, there's an interesting LT thread developing over at the Information Architecture discussion list, SIGIA-L. See: http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/0509/
Worldcat is heaven, but not free. There are Open Worldcat records in Google and Yahoo, but they are just a tiny slice of the grand gateau.
Your comments on MARC21 really made me laugh. 80% of librarians can't grok MARC, or Z39.50. Your accomplishment is just towering. I thank you.
Off-topic, but, as a non-librarian, I'd like to thank those who've commented on this post for providing so many intriguing links to look at that I was unaware of. I've aready searched for one of the books I've just added(Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery's anthology about imaginary languages "Imagining Language") at the MIT Library site Barton,
itself found via a search at the abovementioned Wikipedia pageBooksouces, and found several other books I'd like to read. The LT discussion at SIGIA-L sounds interesting too. This LibraryThing of ours just ramifies and ramifies, don't it?
This website lists all the Z39.50 targets available globally, their ports, and their access level :
http://www.indexdata.dk/targettest/
May I request the University of Sydney and the British Library (- you've already got American sources!)?
Thank you!
You can also use the National Library of Quebec for an alternative for French books. It has all of french canadian books and also the City of Montreal collection online.
www.bnquebec.ca
Through this Wikipedia page, I found a
portal to many national libraries. It's maintained by the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.
I would really appreciate if the Dutch national library would be added. Many Dutch books can be found in the Library of Congress, but I need to add translations of foreign literature into Dutch manually. However, I completely understand if national libraries of larger language areas will be added first :).
Two other, unrelated, comments:
1) The .csv-file looks like a mess on my computer. It puts all data belonging to one row in only one column.
2) Perhaps, you could earn more money on LibraryThing by offering some possibilities for small booksellers. If their business is too small for a full database site, they could just display their collection in a nice way here. With one mouseclick a book could be bought. But maybe it's not your objective to earn money from your great site in such a way. It was just an idea :).
The .csv-file looks like a mess on my computer. It puts all data belonging to one row in only one column.
***************************
In Excel, you can fix this by selecting the column, clicking on "Data", click on "Text to Columns," Select delimited and click "next," select comma and click "next," make any other changes you need, then click finish.
I'm seconding Brian on the call for an Australian library - most of my books do have isbns, but they aren't recognised by the Library of Congress, or either of the big Amazons. National Library of Australia would be the obvious choice.
cheers!
Harvard has everything a 19th-century Americanist (like myself) could ever need, but they don't like to share anything so I don't know if that would work.
Alas, Harvard's system is closed to outsiders without passwords, even the Divinity School library, which is otherwise open stacks.
Don't worry, I'll turn over every stone. I think Princeton is open, and I haven't checked Yale.
-jf, Thanks a lot!
News from the National Library in Australia is that in the new year (2006) the National Bibliographic Database via Libraries Australia will be free for the general public to search - maybe you can get access to that. The NBD is funded from the member libraries.
The NBD is a union catalogue of hundreds of Australian libraries including all Universities, many public and specials.
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