I went through a process similar to what you describe sometime back for a
tool I made (i.e. I could find no easily downloadable info). You can
download something that will be easier to parse from

http://calculate.alptown.com/gac.js

It's probably not 100% accurate as I haven't downloaded for quite awhile.
But catalogers have me correct errors they discover and there are about 800
unique visitors per day so I assume they notice most things.

It would be nice if this kind of data could be provided in a straightforward
format.

kyle



On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 2:44 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Can anyone remind me if there's a machine readable copy of the MARC
> geographic codes available at any persistent URL?
>
> They're in HTML at http://www.loc.gov/marc/**geoareas/gacs_code.html<http://www.loc.gov/marc/geoareas/gacs_code.html>. I actually had a script that automatically downloaded from there and
> "scraped" the HTML -- but sometime since I wrote the script, the HTML
> structure on the page changed and it broke.
>
> (I kind of thought that was unlikely since that HTML page itself was
> machine generated -- but I guess they changed the software that generated
> it. Certainly I knew that scraping HTML was a bad thing to rely on... which
> is why I hope LC provides this in some format less likely to change?)
>



-- 
----------------------------------------------------------
Kyle Banerjee
Digital Services Program Manager
Orbis Cascade Alliance
[log in to unmask] / 503.877.9773