WorldCat Search API

A WorldCat API for Ruby to interact with WorldCat search webservices. www.worldcat.org

Usage

require 'worldcat'

client = WorldCat.new '[api_key]'

Get Atom or RSS response from an OpenSearch

atom = client.open_search :query => "Civil War"
puts atom.feed.title
puts atom.entries.first.author

Get MARC XML or Dublin Core from a SRU CQL query

cql = 'srw.kw="civil war" and (srw.su="antietam" or srw.su="sharpsburg")'

records = client.sru_search :query => cql, :format => "marcxml"
for record in records
  # print out field 245 subfield a
  puts record['245']['a']
end

If you’d like to use another implementation, the raw response is available:

client.raw_response

A faster way?

rss = WorldCat.new.open_search :q => "Globalization", :format => "rss", :wskey => '[api_key]'

For more information, please have a look at the documentation or the test cases.

Installation

gem install worldcat

Why?

The ‘wcapi’ gem does not satisfy several points, so another version is justified for many reasons:

  • It is better to use a RSS Ruby implementation, actually SimpleRSS, to get Atom or RSS response.

  • It is better to use the MARC Ruby implementation to get MARC XML or Dublin Core response from a SRU CQL search or other search.

  • Unit testing is great.

What this API can do

  • Send searches in OpenSearch or SRU CQL syntax.

  • Receive OpenSearch responses in RSS or Atom format (both are a SimpleRSS object).

  • Receive SRU responses in an array of MARC::Record or Dublin Core (REXML::Document).

  • Receive a MARC::Record for a single OCLC record.

  • Receive a REXML::Document for geographically-sorted library holdings information.

  • Receive a HTML formatted String for standard bibliographic citation formats (APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, and Turabian).

To do

  • Use SRU gem to get response from sru_search.

Contribution

Feel free to fork and send me a pull request for changes, fixes or simply a message for any suggestion.

See

Vivien Didelot <[email protected]> github.com/v0n/worldcat