Great to see that OpenLibrary (“One web page for every book”) now has an API!
There’s an interesting debate going on via the Code4Lib email list regarding the API. Specifically, should they have used SRU or is exposing a simple API better? Personally, I’m all for simple APIs that non-library techies can pick up and run with.
I’ve worked as a developer in libraries now for nearly 14 years and I’ve never used (or even seriously looked at) SRU. When I read the specification, I can feel my eyes begin to slowly glaze over! Perhaps this is just because I cut my teeth writing EDI processing software in COBOL and I’ve always suspected that people who develop specifications for use in libraries (e.g. Edifact, Z39.50, MARC, etc) are all a bunch of masochists 😉
2 thoughts on “new API from OpenLibrary”
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I started having a look at some yahoo pipeworl for this: here’s the first attempt – isbn10 lookup…
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=RPaoZPgc3RGpKzLWEpPZnA
I took Tony’s pipe and extended it to a author/title search.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=cc7946ac9166541b4ed2cc4da9250047
There are potentially a lot of full text books from the OCA without ISBNs, so we have been exploring other ways to match our books with OCA scanned content in OpenLibrary.