[librecat-dev] catmandu for simple usecases

[Jakob Voß]

Hi Marc,
You wrote:

> description of the tools i need
> 
> * query a remote library with CC licenced records. queries
>    are simple:
> 
>    * search a book by matching in title
>    * search a book by matching in author

If the library provides any kind of standard API (e.g. SRU) this is no 
deal with Catmandu. For instance the Library of Congress has an SRU API 
at http://lx2.loc.gov:210/LCDB.

>    * search related/suggested books for a book ID
>    * search FR translations for a book ID

These tasks are too under-specified to be solvable easily. Anyway it not 
depends on Catmadu or any other toolkit but on the query capabilies of 
the library databases you need to query to answert these questions.

> * store some some of them into a tiny local storage (a yaml file should be
>     perfect)

Writing to files or to different kinds of databases is just a matter of 
one or two options in Catmandu.

 > * use those storages to maintain bibliographies

This less depends on Catmandu but on the bibliographic data format you 
need. Pandoc can directly use MODS, so no problem.

> ideal usecase of an higher level wrapper usable from the CLI should be
> 
>      $ book search \
>          author like Hafner \
>          title  like Wizard
> 
>        id: 23424
>        title: Where Wizards Stay Up Late
>        subtitle: The Origins Of The Internet
>        author: Katie Hafner and Matthiew Lyon
>        ISBN: 0-684-87216-1
>        seealso: 8768
>        copy-url: https://monoskop.org/images/e/ee/Hafner_Katie_Lyon_Matthew_Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late_The_Origins_Of_The_Internet.pdf
> 
>      $ book search id is 8768
> 
>        id: 8768
>        title: 50 Years of Army Computing: From ENIAC to MSRC
>        author: Army Research Laboratory
>        ISBN: 097023161X
>        copy-url: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a431730.pdf

MODS is more verbose than simple key-values so at some point you might 
want to simplify. There are XSLT stylesheets to do so

https://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/mods-conversions.html

Catmandu can also do XML processing but has its strength with 
JSON/YAML-like structures.

>      $ book append computer-history 23424 8768
> 
>          ~/.books/computer-history.yaml updated
> 
>      $ book bibliography from computer-history to bibtex > paper.bibtex

Have a look at pandoc-citeproc so you don't need BibTeX.

Cheers,
Jakob

-- 
Jakob Voß <jakob.voss at gbv.de>
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de/