Im Artikel Using Book Data Providers to Improve Services to Patrons in der neuen Code4Lib-Ausgabe beschreibt Mike Beccaria, wie er für ein Widget bibliographische Informationen über die APIs von Librarything, Open Library und Google Book Search bezieht.
At Paul Smith’s College, I recently implemented a “New Books” display using open APIs and an image scroller. In this article I’ll give a brief overview of Google Book Search, OpenLibrary and Worldcat, explain how I created this New Books Widget using book cover data, and provide readers with some practical and simple code to show how to collect this data. This article will be of interest to anyone who wants to read about a brief overview of current state of free book data service providers. Additionally, beginner programmers will likely find the examples at the end of the article helpful when getting started with projects of their own.
Sein Widget beschreibt er folgendermaßen:
Python software that reads a text file containing ISBN numbers and uses them to query Open Library and Google Book Search for book information from the respective libraries and adds them to a MYSQL database. Also downloads and processes book thumbnail covers.
Eine interessante Ergänzung zur Kollektion ähnlicher Widgets im Code4Lib-Wiki, die bei der Weiterentwicklung des Open Book Widgets sicherlich Einfluß haben wird.