Terry’s Worklog

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

Lots of updates.  Of note:

1. Inclusion of a plug-in manager
   1. Necessitated the inclusion of Zip functionality (thanks to the SharpDevelop project [http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/])
   2. AppDomain manager (for loading and unloading code)
2. Fixed Preview file error: Follow the code execution patches, windows has changed the format in which file names are passed to applications.  This corrects the problems introduced by this change.
3. Fixed Delimited Text Translator:  Essentially, I re-wrote the parse functions to provide better delimited text support.
4. Lots of bug fixes.

BTW, I’ll be putting up a version of mantis (or something else) to provide easier bug tracking.  This way, I can point folks to my tracking system (which currently is just an access database that I use to track tickets).

The big change is obviously the Plug-in manager/functionality.  The program now supports the ability for folks to create code modules that can interact with MarcEdit.  I have ideas for two new plug-ins — one relating to the Z39.50 client and one being a Dspace plug-in to help me with spidering and packaging HTML/sites for inclusion into Dspace.   Like the OCLC Plug-in, I’ll post the source files of each plug-in as I complete them.

The source code for the OCLC Plug-in can be found at: OCLC_Plugin.zip. [update: One quick note about this particular plug-in.  I didn't get any documentation or help from OCLC, so while I'm confident enough that this works to put it out there for folks to try if they like -- please make sure that you make a backup of your Connexion file before processing.  Without the database schema, much of what I know about the Connexion database structure was through examination, and trial and error. ]

Updates for MarcEdit can be found at: MarcEdit51_Setup.exe.

If you need info on some of the update changes, see:

• MarcEdit Plug-ins: OCLC Connexion Plug-in data
• MarcEdit Delimited Text Translator Changes

–TR