[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 dg9 (2024-08-01)

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/

[davidjoseph1]

I have been playing with this metadata source plugin, updated the python, and have gotten it working in 6.17.0. What I would like to do is be able to parse the LCC and DCC information in the SRU served pages and feed that into custom LCC and DCC columns.

This would obviate Library Codes.

[plaxamate]

Loving the update. Works almost flawlessly for my workflow.

[davidjoseph1]

Important note - you are limited to 40 queries per minute on the LCDB lookup, and 20 queries per minute on the Voyager Z39.50 lookup.

[davidjoseph1]

Updated plugin, to add back the Library of Congress main SRU portal at lx2.loc.gov, and to update the German National Library destination permalink URLaddress (kxp.k10plus.de).

[davidjoseph1]

I've rewritten the SRU plugin to retrieve Library of Congress classification codes and import them as tags, and have inserted timeout delays in the code in order to prevent your IP address from being blocked by the LOC SRU server for too many requests in a minute. This version is named somewhat differently so it can be installed alongside the earlier version and configured independently.

I can rewrite this to also grab the Dewey Decimal information the same way.

Tips for use? set the plugin and your metadata preferences only to retrieve tag metadata. select the books for which you wish to retrieve classification cataloguing, clear the existing tags field for all of the selected books, then run this, which pulls the '050' 'a' and 'b' MARC21 fields in and imports them as tags prefixed with 'lcca_" and "lccb_" and then bulk edit metadata from the selected books as a regex 'lcc?' without separators into a new sortable taglike column which can contain your Library of Congress classification number.

I probably will alter the query to request MODS Object Defined XML instead of the MARCXML default, which will allow me to pull in the Library of Congress Classification number as a single field which can then be cleanly bulk-copied without any regex.

I have another version which loads those fields into the 'Summary' field in the calibre core metadata, but which is not working correctly yet.

[alemen]

Hi,
Would it be to difficult to had an other source of metadata ?
i'm thinking about the BNF (Bibliothèque nationale de France) for all the books in French. The French National Library have a pretty fast and usefull SRU : https://api.bnf.fr/fr/api-sru-catalogue-general
Could give a hand to help add the BNF as metadata sources even if i'm not a professional in coding

[davidjoseph1]

Originally Posted by alemen

Hi,
Would it be to difficult to had an other source of metadata ?
i'm thinking about the BNF (Bibliothèque nationale de France) for all the books in French. The French National Library have a pretty fast and usefull SRU : https://api.bnf.fr/fr/api-sru-catalogue-general

SRU is coded to parse marcxml in the MARC21 standard, et parce que les français font tout à leur manière, à la différence du reste de l'univers - ils utilisent UNIMARC - je dois réécrire un gros morceau de code.

I have the UNIMARC to MARC21 conversion standards. There's no technical reason why I can't do it. But I need to find the correct related fields and tweak the search.

[dcoulombe]

Hello. I am very interested in this thread, since I 'desperately' need to find LCCs for a large number of books. I installed sru-dglcc3.zip from the link in a previous message. But no icon appear, even after restarting Calibre. What is exactly the procedure to use this extension. I was using Library Codes extension up to last year, when it became obsolete and stopped working. Being able to recover this funcionality would be GREAT!... Can you give me a tiny hint? Thanks!

[davidjoseph1]

Originally Posted by dcoulombe

Hello. I am very interested in this thread, since I 'desperately' need to find LCCs for a large number of books. I installed sru-dglcc3.zip from the link in a previous message. But no icon appear, even after restarting Calibre. What is exactly the procedure to use this extension. I was using Library Codes extension up to last year, when it became obsolete and stopped working. Being able to recover this funcionality would be GREAT!... Can you give me a tiny hint? Thanks!

I updated the Library Codes plugin as Library Codes -SRU and it's posted as a new thread.
You should be able to install it from inside Calibre now. That works better.

To use sru-dglcc3 for the same functionality, you have to erase all tags in the books you want to get lccs, and, and then move the lcca and lccb tags wth a regex into the LCC column.

[davidjoseph1]

To use SRU, by the way, you configure it as you would any metadata plugin, and then call it via crtl-D on the main screen or within the edit metadata individually screen.

[davidjoseph1]

New Version, cleaned up!