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README

/*  Copyright 2008 2009 Goetz Hatop */
/*  Copyright 2009 2010 Stephan Rosenke <rosenke@ulb.tu-darmstadt.de> */

=== About ===
This is am implementation of unAPI for OCLC PICA library systems (LBS)

/*  This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
*/

=== Installation ===

Edit unapi.php and set the opac variable to your local OCLC/PICA system.
Put the script together with PicaRecord.php on a web server.
Your records identified by ppn will then be available via unapi.

Try out unClient.php to see an example on how to fetch data
delivered by the unapi.php server script.
The unclient script too requires the PicaRecord.php to be included,
so copy unclient.php and the PicaRecord.php script to a place on your 
web server where you can reach it. 
This needs not to be the same server where your unapi.php script lives.

=== About unAPI: an un-API for webapps ===

unAPI is a tiny HTTP API for the few basic operations necessary to copy
discrete, identified content from any kind of web application.
See http://unapi.info/ for more information.

=== What is Pica LBS ===

OCLC/Pica distributes an integrated library system (ILS) named LBS
which presents its data for human beeings in a nice search interface 
called PSI. For automata, the bibliographic records are not really
hidden but not available in a useful or standardized format.

=== About this software  ===

This PHP script utilisizes the xml web interfaces which usually
comes with the LBS software to make bibliographic records available 
via the unAPI protocoll. It formats them as dublin core, in a xml format
or as the plain pica data surrounded by a few tags. MARC is missed from the
list of available formats but could be added if someone can figure out
how to map pica categories to marc records.

Getting bibliographic records via a clean web interface is a necessary 
basic step for further processing the data for e.g. web based 
bibliographies or application to enrich the records further.

The PICA records do come as categories, and all the art of converting
them to somethink like dublin core comes down to figure out the
meaning of the categories.

The program unapi.php uses php curl to contact an opac server and
retrieve a bibliographic record identified by a ppn, which is the
basic identifier in the PICA world. 
Which opac server to contact can be specified in the file unapi.php 
by setting the $opac parameter. Its default value is 'localhost' such 
that this script can run on the same server as the opac server itself. 
If for some reason the opac server does not have a running apache
with php and curl available (it may be a production system), the 
script can easily run elsewhere.

To interpret the bibliographic data the class PicaRecord is used which 
comes in its own file PicaRecord.php.
This class is the one which should be used to adapt to local
cataloging rules.

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