[Metadata Source Plugin] SRU - Library of Congress & GBV (ger)

[vform]

This plugin can query either the Library of Congress or the GBV (Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund - Germany) for metadata.

It uses Search/Retrieve via URL (SRU) and fetches the metadata in MARC format. Theoretically additional SRU sources could be added easily.

Main Features

• Retrieve metadata by ISBN
• Retrieve metadata by author and title
• Metadata to fetch: Author, Title, Series, ISBN, Comments, Languages, Publisher, Published Date, Tags
• Three categories of tags are fetched: Genre, Topic (Thesaurus), Topic (free). For each a prefix can be set in case you want to have an easy overview of where a tag came from.
• Should be fast, since it only has to do one query

Note

• It does not fetch covers. There might sometimes be covers, yet library catalogs are just not the best source

History
Version 0.6.1 (2014-01-29)

• Fix: Typo

Version 0.6 (2014-01-28)

• Fix: don't check title or author if result is retrieved via ISBN
• Fix: Check if author matches if result is NOT retrieved via ISBN
• Fix: GBV and LOC now get a clickable link (identifier)
• Fix: Reset button has a label
• Tweak: Minimum results to fetch defaults to 10 (instead 1) now; otherwise results from LOC are really bad sometimes
• Tweak: Search for short title (e.g. just 'Animal farm' instead of Animal farm: a fairy story')
• Other: Minor fixes

Version 0.5 (2014-01-27; initial release)

Todo

• Find out how to use my own relevance scoring (~thread)
• I have absolutely no experience with Python, so some of the code might be not state of the art. In my tests nothing breaks it anymore, yet it isn't tested extensively. I got some ideas on what to improve, yet not that much time. So I release it as it is and hope someone finds it useful

Bugs

• None...?

[nyukuri]

Hi,

thank you very much for your plugin. Reading about it (import from MARC format) I have the following question: would it be possible to create a plugin that does EXPORT the catalog in UNIMARC format?

We are using PMB (a library cataloging software) and somehow need to import there our Calibre catalog. PMB can import catalog entries from UNIMARC format but Calibre cannot export to UNIMARC (or any other related MARC standard).

Such a plugin would be REALLY helpful, as we have thousands of books to catalog...

Thank you for consideration - or suggestions of a third way how to get my problem solved....

Martin

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by nyukuri

Hi,

thank you very much for your plugin. Reading about it (import from MARC format) I have the following question: would it be possible to create a plugin that does EXPORT the catalog in UNIMARC format?

We are using PMB (a library cataloging software) and somehow need to import there our Calibre catalog. PMB can import catalog entries from UNIMARC format but Calibre cannot export to UNIMARC (or any other related MARC standard).

Such a plugin would be REALLY helpful, as we have thousands of books to catalog...

Thank you for consideration - or suggestions of a third way how to get my problem solved....

Martin

You might want to take a look at calibre Catalogs which can output a catalog of calibre books in several formats including csv, xml, and BiBTeX. I'm sure there are tools that can export any of those to MARC.

[vform]

Updated the plugin, see first post.

Originally Posted by nyukuri

would it be possible to create a plugin that does EXPORT the catalog in UNIMARC format?

We are using PMB (a library cataloging software) and somehow need to import there our Calibre catalog.

I think eschwartz gave a good answer. You already can export as xml and I think it should be pretty easy to rename the tags to Marc tags. But the Bibtex export option (Bib) might be even easier - I guess it's not completely unlikely that PMB supports Bibtex import.

Oh, this looks nice (CSV to Marc): http://marcedit.reeset.net/