Harvesting MARC Data with the WorldCat Search API

Abstract

The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) hopes for a world where all content providers openly share their metadata with all discovery service providers, but we are still far from that world. While libraries depend more and more on publisher-provided metadata, libraries are often left with poor quality metadata or sometimes with no metadata at all. In this environment, librarians need to develop web-scale tools to provide web-scale discovery and access. In this lightning talk I will introduce a Python script I have been developing which uses the WorldCat Search API to batch search and download OCLC MARC records which I use to harvest metadata to supplement publisher-provided metadata or to transform the records into a KBART file for ingest.