Exploiting the content of the HathiTrust, epilogue
Posted on August 14, 2012 in Uncategorized by Eric Lease Morgan
This blog posting simply points to a browsable and downloadable set of MARC records describing a set of books in both in the HathiTrust as well as the Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame.
In a previous blog posting I described how I downloaded about 25,000 MARC records that:
- were denoted as in the public domain
- described books publish prior to 1924
- were denoted as a part of the Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame
- were denoted as a part of the HathiTrust
- had a one-to-one correspondance between OCLC number and digitized item
This list of MARC records is not nor was not intended to be a comprehensive list of overlapping materials between the Hesburgh Libraries collection and the HathiTrust. Instead, this list is intended to be a set of unambiguous sample data allowing us to import and assimilate HathiTrust records into our library catalog and/or “discovery system” on an experimental basis.
The browsable interface is rudimentary. Simply point your browser to the interface and a list of ten randomly selected titles from the MARC record set will be displayed. Each title will be associated with the date of publication and three links. The first link points to the HathiTrust catalog record where you will be able to read/view the item’s bibliographic data. The second link points to the digitized version of the item complete with its searching/browsing interface. Third and final link queries OCLC for libraries owning the print version of the item. This last link is here to prove that the item is owned by the Hesburgh Libraries.
Screen shot of browsable interface
For a good time, you can also download the MARC records as a batch.
Finally, why did I create this interface? Because people will want to get a feel for the items in question before the items’ descriptions and/or URLs become integrated into our local system(s). Creating a browsable interface seemed to be one of the easier ways I could accomplish that goal.
Fun with MARC records, the HathiTrust, and application programmer interfaces.
