You could download a snapshot of the full LC back file at the Internet Archive (kindly donated by Scriblio). http://www.archive.org/details/marc_records_scriblio_net Then run a script using your favorite MARC parsing library (mine currently is pymarc): from pymarc import MARCReader for record in MARCReader(file('part01.dat')): if record['020'] and record['020']['a']: print record['020']['a'] //Ed On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 9:35 AM, Godmar Back <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Hi, > > for an investigation/study, I'm looking to obtain a representative > sample set (say a few hundreds) of ISBNs. For instance, the sample > could represent LoC's holdings (or some other acceptable/meaningful > population in the library world). > > Does anybody have any pointers/ideas on how I might go about this? > > Thanks! > > - Godmar >