Tim (and others),

APIs for books are definitely NOT dead.
I use several of them for my code to harvest library of congress call
numbers (starting with an ISBN) to make it possible for us to analyze our
COUNTER usage data at a subject classification level, since COUNTER itself
does not include any kind of classification.  Right now I use Library of
Congress, Harvard, Google Books, and  OpenLibrary. In an earlier version of
this work I used yours, until it disappeared. I also used to use OCLC's
until they locked it up last year so I couldn't get a key for it anymore.

I didn't realize LibraryThing has full MARC records. If those include the
050 (LC call number), I would very much love an API that if I send either
an OCLC number (aka OCN or OCOLC, usually in marc 035)
 or an ISBN, you'd give me back the 050 (LC call number).

Hopefully you'd be able to support doing this for a long list of
ISBNs/OCNs, eg 5,000 per day. Any one user wouldn't likely do 5,000 per day
for more than one or two days,  but we want to be able to just take the
list of ISBNs from a COUNTER report (eg the TR_B1 usage report) and throw
it into a script that just checks all of them, and puts the results
somewhere useful, like a TSV file.


Melissa Belvadi
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On Tue, Aug 27, 2024 at 5:52 PM Tim Spalding <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> TL;DR: Is anyone still using library- and book-related APIs? If you could
> have an API to anything known to LibraryThing, what would you want?
>
> I'm revamping LibraryThing's APIs, and am interested in what the Code4Lib
> community is thinking about APIs and mashups today. Is anyone doing
> anything interesting, or is this an idea from the past?
>
> On the one hand, I remember the heady days of cool book APIs and library
> mashups. I contributed a chapter to Nicole Engard's book "Library Mashups."
> I want to be part of a supportive community of people doing cool things.
> Making new APIs for that is worth it to me.
>
> On the other, LibraryThing has had to shut down many of its free APIs
> because they saw almost no "good" use—just a lot of abusive scraping. I
> want to make cool APIs for library- and book-people doing interesting
> things with books. I don't want to help jerks with crappy or dangerous
> "free ebook" sites populate their data. Whatever we do, it has to have
> clear limits.
>
> So what's your feeling?
>
> Secondarily, if you had access to everything LibraryThing knows—twenty
> years of direct and implied user data about books, some 70m MARC records(1)
> and so forth—what would you want an API to? We sell some of what he have
> already, in services like Syndetics Unbound(2), and we aren't going to
> provide free APIs to a paid product, but there's a lot we can do for
> libraries without any commercial concerns.
>
> Best,
> Tim
> LibraryThing
>