[ apologies for cross-posting ] Dan Chudnov recently pointed me in the direction of the LC Name Authority File Web Service that OCLC has made available as part of their ResearchWorks efforts [1]. They are doing some very cool stuff these days. I wanted to see how easy it would be to query the service for authority records for "Tolkien". Here's what I came up with: #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use SOAP::Lite; use XML::Simple; ## submit request my $result = SOAP::Lite ->proxy( 'http://alcme.oclc.org/eprintsUK/services/NACOMatch' ) ->getNameAuthority( name( 'name' => 'Tolkien' ), name( 'maxList' => 100 ) ) ->result(); ## parse xml response my $names = XMLin( $result ); ## output each result foreach my $match ( @{ $names->{ match } } ) { print $match->{ establishedForm }, "\n"; } Which I was pleased with, so I wrote a little command line utility [2] that does the same thing, with documentation if you want to try it out yourself. //Ed [1] http://www.oclc.org/research/researchworks/ [2] http://www.inkdroid.org/code/tools/naf -- Ed Summers aim: inkdroid web: http://www.inkdroid.org Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgement difficult. [Hippocrates]