Quoting Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]>:

> Can anyone remind me if there's a machine readable copy of the MARC  
> geographic codes available at any persistent URL?

Not sure how persistent, but here's Ross's version:

http://marccodes.heroku.com/gacs/

I often made the point at MARBI meetings (before I just gave up going  
to them) that all of MARC (tags, subfields, codes) should be available  
in a machine-readable form.[1] I go NUTS when I see those email  
notices come around, the idea that all over the world people are  
manually keying in codes into a local table. Please help us make sure  
that does not happen in any future formats!!!! Make noise now!

kc

[1] The result was that a few meetings later LC announced that they  
had coded the MARC online pages in XML, and were generating the HTML  
from that. I think I was mis-understood.

>
> They're in HTML at 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?)
>



-- 
Karen Coyle
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ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet