I am attempting to incorporate LibraryThing into our card catalog and I thought I would share the steps I am taking as I go through this process just in case there are others that are wanting to do the same thing. I have had the API training on Sirsi but I do not use it every day so there might be a better way to do some of the things that I am doing.

The first step was to contact LibraryThing and ask for an account. I contacted sonyagreen [at] librarything.com and explained what I wanted to do. They were great and got right back with me. They will allow me to test this out at no charge. So I am using out test system and will then hopefully show everyone here this idea product.

Now I needed to get the data out of our system. I did it in the following manner

selitem -oC | selcatalog -iC -oe -e020,245,100 > ISBN_extract.out

This selects the item and output the catalog key and then pipes this into the selcatalog command using the catalog key as the input and then output isbn, title and author and then sends all that data to the file ISBN_extract.out

This is great and simple. There is one same problem that our data is not really clean so I am going to have to write a perl script that cleans up the data and replaces the pipe delimiter with a tab delimiter.

No problem. This will be in part II