So OCLC’s WorldCat Registry is a nice new addition to OCLCs growing list of web services. Do a search for your library and take a look at the URL: aye that’s right it’s SRU. In fact do a view source on the results page and you’ll see an SRU response in XML–the HTML is being rendered with client side XSLT.
If you drill into a particular institution you’ll see a pleasantly cool uri:
…which would serve nicely as an identifier for the Browne Popular Culture Library. The institution pages are HTML instead of XML–however there is a link to an XML representation:
http://worldcat.org/webservices/registry/content/Institutions/89073
This URL isn’t bad but it would be rather nice if the former could return XML if the Accept: header had text/xml slotted before text/html. Yeah, I did check:
curl -I "Accept: text/xml" http://worldcat.org/registry/Institutions/89073
It’s inspiring to see OCLC going the extra mile to make their new services have web friendly machine APIs.
Update: for deeper analysis check out Pete Johnston’s WorldCat Institution Registry and Identifiers. He has some great points on the use of identifiers in the xml responses.
OCLC also introduced two web services that you can use to access the new WorldCat Registries. On this web page: http://www.worldcat.org/affiliate/default.jsp, the two are listed. There is one for searching and a companion web service to retrieve the detail records for institutions. Just register via the WorldCat.org affiliate site.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Best regards,
Chuck Costakos, OCLC