I recently launched my first web application. Handlist takes a file of MARC records and turns them into an alphabetically sorted book catalog of titles, authors and subject headings.

It was mostly an excuse to use merb and learn some web programming, but the gem that I wrote behind it was useful for me in a part-time job, so maybe it will be useful for someone else.

If you have a file of some MARC records handy (and less than 2MB) could you give it a test? What could I have done differently? Since I’m new to this I’m all ears. Hopefully soon I’ll post about some of the things I learned while working on this project.

http://handlist.ronallo.com

I just released version 0.1.0 of zcc, my Ruby copy cataloging script. Lot’s of improvements and new features. Find out more here:

http://zcc.rubyforge.org/zcc.html

I’m really happy with the progress I’ve made with this release. Finally I think I’m starting to get Object Oriented programming. I rewrote much of the code to create reusable classes in the hopes that I could play with some of the same code with a simple Rails based application.

I was trying to tackle a little problem. There is the right way to do it, and then a way that might just work.
ruby-marc doesn’t do character conversion from MARC-8 to UTF-8. This is a problem as most MARC records are still trapped in MARC-8 character encoding. It’s particularly a problem for something I’d like to add to my copy cataloging script.

Right now I use ruby-zoom to grab records from Z39.50 targets. These z-targets, even if they store their information as UTF-8, still usually present their records to the world as MARC-8 encoded records. In normal workflow this isn’t a problem. As a C-binding to ZOOM, ruby-zoom does character conversion through YAZ. I can grab a record and, besides checking leader byte 9 to double check the current character set, ruby-zoom does the work of conversion.

But what if I want to read in a MARC-8 encoded record from file using ruby-marc and convert it to UTF-8? I’m outta luck. And as part of my script I’d like to be able to do just that. I’d then be able to maintain the same workflow: accept records, run through a macro, edit subfields, and create a csv file for labelmaking. And there’s no straightforward way I’ve found to move a ruby-marc record object into a ruby-zoom record object to do the conversion.

So I thought what if I could get the record from file into ruby-zoom first, do the conversion and then accept the record as a marc object? So in order to mock something up really quick I created a fake SRU server with WEBrick that always responded with the contents of the file supplied on the command line. The file was in MARC-8 and to work with SRU it was converted to MARCXML–except with the MARC-8 character encoding still. Very bad idea I’m sure to have MARC-8 XML.

I wanted to put the server into a thread that would stop when the program terminated and then in the same script slurp up the record using zoom, convert to UTF-8 and then move the record into a ruby-marc record object. For some reason I couldn’t do both things from the same script.

So then I wrote another script that could use SRU in zoom to grab the awful MARC-8 MARCXML record, do character conversion and move it over to a marc record. Even if I did a system call from the first script to this other script it failed. So I opened up another terminal to run the slurping script.

In the end I got it working. Who knows if the character encoding on it would have been any good. The main problem was how slow it was and how I needed to use two different scripts to get it to work. I learned a lot about SRU and WEBrick, but in the end it was a Rube Goldberg machine.

Soon I hope to share my current idea that’s forming on how to solve this problem for ZCC. Let’s hope it doesn’t end up the same mess as this one.