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This one’s for you: Introducing the OCLC Cooperative Platform

At the recent American Library Association conference, held in late June in New Orleans, I had the privilege of presenting — with a few of your Developer Network colleagues — on OCLC’s new Cooperative Platform.

What’s that, you ask?

Submitted by HARNISHK on Wed, 07/06/2011 - 11:08am
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Planned downtime for WorldCat Identities, xID services to upgrade storage capacity

On Sunday, July 10 there will be a scheduled service downtime for a number of OCLC services from 1:00 am until at least 6:00 am and, at most, 11:00 am (U.S. Eastern Time). We apologize for any inconvenience this causes. We need to take the following services off-line in order to upgrade the storage systems and capacity for all OCLC services. During this time, the following services will be unavailable:

· OCLC Platform

· WorldCat Identities

· xISSN and xISBN

Submitted by alicesneary on Tue, 06/28/2011 - 11:00pm
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Enhancements to WorldCat Search API

This past weekend we added some new enhancements to the WorldCat Search API.

New Open Digital Limit

The new Open Digital Limit is available through the SRU queries.  This limit returns records describing digital content contributed to WorldCat from open access digital repositories.  Records contain that URLs the point to the digital file.

The searchable values are:

Submitted by librarywebchic on Tue, 06/28/2011 - 2:26pm
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Come see Platform prototype and draft apps at ALA Annual

If you're planning to attend ALA, put this meeting on your calendar. Or better yet, your calendar and your Director's calendar. You’re going to like what you see.

We'll also be videotaping the session--so no worries if you aren't heading to New Orleans next week. Watch this space for the video link after the conference.

So what’s the session? We went with a New Orleans-themed approach:

Submitted by alicesneary on Wed, 06/15/2011 - 9:21am
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Testing Web Services

One of my roles with the Developer Network is to test and teach OCLC web services. While it isn't part of my job to do the regular testing of the services, there are some other things that go hand in hand with it that are: documentation and support for the services, building code examples and teaching people about the services. So when someone reports something as an problem, the first thing I do is try to replicate the issue. When my code isn't working, I fall back to making sure the service performs as anticipated. With RESTful read only services this is pretty simple.

Submitted by librarywebchic on Tue, 06/14/2011 - 10:19am
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From the archives: How we built the WorldCat Facebook App using the WorldCat Search API

Way back in 2007, when Facebook was new and interesting to me, as part of my work in testing how the WorldCat Search API would behave in the real world I wrote a Facebook app that would search WorldCat.  

Submitted by btwashburn on Fri, 06/10/2011 - 8:55am
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URL Encoding Special Characters in API requests

This issue of url encoding special characters is something you want to keep in mind with any form input you send to an API. An example of this with WorldCat Search API is if someone puts in a title search like "Kate & Leopold". The ampersand in this will cause the API to throw an error message if you don't URL encode it. The wisest way to handle this is to URL encode any form input that might have any special characters in it. Things like title, keyword are likely suspects.

Submitted by librarywebchic on Tue, 06/07/2011 - 1:02pm
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WorldCat Search API tips and tricks

There are lots of types of requests which can be made to the WorldCat Search API which aren't always obvious. One of my favorities in the "Holding Location" request type. Most developers use this type of request to find out which libraries hold a particular book.

For example -

But it also works without the filter to a specific books. So you can do requests like

http://www.worldcat.org/webservices/catalog/content/libraries/15550774?location=maine&libtype=2&wskey=[key]

which will get you public libraries in the state of Maine:

Submitted by librarywebchic on Fri, 06/03/2011 - 2:43pm
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mapFINDS Ohio: A native iPhone App using the WorldCat Search API and mapFAST

mapFINDS Ohio iPhone appHello, I'm Steven Huwig, a programmer at OCLC, and Alice asked me to write a guest post about a recent iPhone project I've completed and published in the App Store.

Submitted by alicesneary on Thu, 05/26/2011 - 11:09am
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Two new visualizations for ELAG

I'm doing a presentation on visualizing library data at ELAG this week. I'm showing off some demonstrations that I built for code4lib 2011 and some new demos that I've built for ELAG. The new demonstrations for ELAG take advantage of two OCLC web services.

Submitted by librarywebchic on Thu, 05/26/2011 - 3:01am
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The OCLC Developer Network supports the use of OCLC Web Services—a set of tools and APIs that expose data and services for WorldCat and our member libraries and partner institutions or companies. learn more »

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