small, fun project

[Daniel Chudnov <daniel.chudnov@yale.edu>]

<shameless request follows>

If anyone's looking for a small test project to learn the MARC.pm and Zeta
perl modules for accessing library catalog information, here's one that
shouldn't take too long... especially if you already know a bit of MARC
and Z39.50.

I'm one of the maintainers of the jake project; jake is a free metadata
reference source describing journals, databases, and full-text
collections. If you haven't seen it, you can take it for a spin at
jake.med.yale.edu.

One thing folks have long wanted to see in jake is subject access.  It's
been suggested by more than one user that we pull down Dewey, LC, and LCSH
classifications for each of the journal titles with a unique identifier in
jake.  We could use this data to make searching/browsing of the products
and serials included in jake much easier, and it would be a real help for
people using jake as a tool for database comparison and selection.

It seems this project could be fairly easily accomplished with a short
perl hack using these modules, but among the folks working on jake we
don't have anyone with the right marc/z39.50/perl background to do it
quickly and cleanly.

So if you're that person, and you might want to contribute an extremely
useful hack to jake, drop a line to me or the jake-devel-list.  I can give
you the datafile to use as input, and we can figure out a file format for
the output of your script.  For whoever makes this happen, dinner's on me
at ALA Chicago. :)


  Regards,

  -Dan


Daniel Chudnov
Systems Architect
Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
Yale University School of Medicine
(203) 785-4347


p.s. Yeah, I know, sorry for the shameless request; hopefully someone will
find this a useful exercise.