On a whim I created a bittorrent of the concatenated MARC files donated to the Internet Archive by Scriblio (7,030,372 records): http://inkdroid.org/torrents/lc-bib.torrent Feel free to download them, and please consider running your client to help seed the data. //Ed On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 2:02 PM, Godmar Back <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Thank you all for the replies. > > To summarize: > > - Tim Spalding offered LibraryThing's database at > http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/LibraryThing_APIs > - Roy Tennant pointed at MIT's Barton dump: available at > <http://simile.mit.edu/rdf-test-data/> > > but the winner is probably this python script based on Ed's suggestion: > > ----- > #!/usr/bin/python > > from urllib import urlopen > from pymarc import MARCReader > > locrecordspattern = > 'http://www.archive.org/download/marc_records_scriblio_net/part%02d.dat' > > for part in range(1, 30): > for record in MARCReader(urlopen(locrecordspattern % part)): > > if record['020'] and record['020']['a']: > print record['020']['a'] > ------ > > Now if I could only figure out how to install "easy_install" on FC8 so > I didn't have to run it with: > env PYTHONPATH=`pwd`/pymarc-2.21 ./readloc.py > > - Godmar > > > > On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 8:20 AM, Ed Summers <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > 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 > > > > > >