RE: searching the nlm catalog

Bernhard Kleine wrote:
>I wonder whether other public libraries will also be
>searchable by pybliographer, e.g. the nlm catalogue of books which would
>make addition of books to bibtex file much sweeter

Bernhard, years ago I did try to get pybliographer to import MARC data
from Z3950 connections to public libraries using this:
http://zoom.z3950.org/misc/zoo.html#4
Although very promising in the beginning (I was able to make the
connection and perform queries) I gave up for a number of reasons, one
of which was that I realized pybliographer needed code to make sense
of the returning MARC formatted entries (for more info on what MARC
is, try http://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/). Because the MARC data can be
different for each individual library you are querying, pyblio will
need to know how to handle it per library. If I understand this
correctly, the other professional reference managing software uses
"filter" files for each library. In fact, these filter files are
available for download from their site. It would be a trivial matter
for a very good programmer (not me :-) to learn how to convert these
files to something that pyblio could use (see
http://www.google.com/search?complete=1&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&q=+site:www.endnote.com+endnote
and the link pointing to "Import Filters"). The other option is to
develop new filter files de novo. Nevertheless, this ultimately means
that pyblio would need to use a filter/template file system too (which
it essentially does already). If anyone out there is a pro at
understanding MARC, please try to contribute.

That said, regarding just the NLM Catalog alone, it should not be too
difficult to add a simple dialog with a query box to prod NCBI. The
code would be very similar to that which was written for the Medline
query. It's a two part query system, one for the query (ESearch),
another to retrieve the data (EFetch). However, after fetching, the
data returned will be in XML. To see what this XML file looks like
see: http://johnvu.net/efetchxml.txt

I know how to do the query, but will need either Peter, Frederic, or
anyone else willing to help to convert that XML data to pyblio format.

-John


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