I'm quickly learning that the hard way! Either vendor lock-in is to blame
for this or the fact that many of these systems predate the web and rely
on esoteric protocols.

I finally ended up screen scraping with curl and using a regex to extract
the title. 

The url looks like this:
http://catalog.library.miami.edu/search/c?QA76.575%20.T47%202009

I'm pretty certain that url parameters map to Z39.50.

In this case the option values in our search form are the parameters:

<option value="X" selected="selected">Keyword</option>
<option value="t">Title</option>
<option value="a">Author</option>
<option value="d">Subject</option>
<option value="c">LC Call Number</option>
<option value="l">Local Call Number</option>
<option value="g">SuDocs Number</option>
<option value="i">ISSN . ISBN Number</option>
<option value="o">OCLC Number</option>
<option value="m">Music Publisher Number</option>


Thanks Godmar!


Juan Madrigal


Web Developer
Web and Emerging Technologies
University of Miami
Richter Library






On 5/10/12 10:57 AM, "Godmar Back" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Scraping III systems has got to be one of the most frequently repeated
>tasks in the history of coding librarianship.
>
>Majax2 ([1,2]) is one such service, though (as of right now) it doesn't
>support search by Call Number.
>Here's an example ISBN search:
>http://libx.lib.vt.edu/services/majax2/isbn/0747591059?opacbase=http://cat
>alog.library.miami.edu/search
>
>Since you have Summon, you could use their API.  Example is here [3,4]
>
> - Godmar
>
>[1] http://libx.lib.vt.edu/services/majax2/
>[2] http://code.google.com/p/majax2/
>[3] http://libx.lib.vt.edu/services/summon/test.php
>[4] http://libx.lib.vt.edu/services/summon/
>
>On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 11:27 AM, Madrigal, Juan A
><[log in to unmask]>wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm looking for a way to send a Call Number to WebOPAC via a query so
>>that
>> I can return data (title, author, etcŠ) for a specific book in the
>>catalog
>> preferably in JSON or XML (I'll even take text at this point).
>> I'm thinking that one way  to accomplish this is via Z39.50 and send a
>> query to the backend that powers WebOPAC
>>
>> Has anyone done something similar to this?
>>
>> PHP YAZ (https://www.indexdata.com/phpyaz) looks promising, but I'd
>> appreciate any guidance.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Juan Madrigal
>>
>> Web Developer
>> Web and Emerging Technologies
>> University of Miami
>> Richter Library
>>