Techie digression: Amazon XML to MARC
Here is a clever little tool that is marginally related to my earlier post about Amazon selling MARC records to libraries along with their book purchases. Charles Ledvina of the Outagamie Waupaca Library System in the US has put together a couple of tools that transform Amazon's XML bibliographic record into fairly decent MARC.
The first, is a web application that takes Amazon's unique identifier, the ASIN, and returns MARC. Here is a link to the MARC equivalent of Amazons record for the 2006 Lonely Planet Fiji.
This Wikipedia page explains how to grab a book's ASIN out of Amazon's URLs.
The second is only for true web geeks - a greasemonkey script that does the same.
Important note: Charles warns readers of the NGC4LIB mailing list, "beware of the subject headings".
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