Library - unsorted

Library glossary Identifiers, classifiers, and other codes Citations Repository notes Open science, research, access, data, etc. Metadata models and standards Online (library) search related OpenURL notes OCLC Pica notes Library-related service notes Knowledge representation / Semantic annotation / structured data / linked data on the web Library - unsorted

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Semi-sorted

On what various common identifiers really are, and what that means to mapping between them

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

MARC field 035 (Local System Number) will often store a (bracketed) string identifier to disambiguate the type of identifier stored there, including:

• OCoLC for OCLC numbers
• DLC for Library of Congress
• ...and many others MARC codes for organizations code/name search

You might for example see 035 $a(OCoLC)ocm69983298

When OCLC numbers are used in the MARC field 001(verify), they are prefixed using:

• ocm for eight-digit numbers (≤99999999)
• ocn for nine-digit numbers (≥100000000)

PyZ3950

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Installation

You need the python PLY package or you will get ImportError: No module named lex. Also as of this writing, ubuntu's python-ply package seems to be broken, but since the modules are pure python, manually unpacking lex.py and yacc.py from the download (into the z3950 directory in your site-packages, for example) also works.

The 2.04 tarball has a bug in the install scripts that causes it to raise:

AttributeError: 'float' object has no attribute 'replace'

This seems to mean the version in vers.py should be a string, not a float.

Docs & notes

• the ZOOM interface's pydoc documentation

How to deal with slow/timeouting connects?

Documentation example:

from PyZ3950 import zoom
conn = zoom.Connection('z3950.loc.gov', 7090)
conn.databaseName          = 'VOYAGER'
conn.preferredRecordSyntax = 'USMARC'

# for example with CCL (there are other options)
query = zoom.Query('CCL', 'ti="this and that"')
results = conn.search(query)

for result in results:
    print result

conn.close()