booklist
If you're a frequent library user, you might go online to your library's public website and search for the latest books available from your favorite authors. If your list of favorite authors is long, that's a tedious task even with saved searches.
This script, booklist
, can make that task easier by automating the task
of determining whether the library has any new publications for those authors.
However, this script will only work with libraries using the CARL.X Integrated Library System. The GitHub repository for 'latest_books' contains a similar script written in Perl, but is designed to work with Horizon's Information Portal version 3.23_6380.
booklist
works by accessing a given library's website to search for
publications from a given author, of a specific media type and within the
current year. The results are printed to the console. The search is
repeated for each author listed in a configuration file.
The configuration file is in YAML format and provides the library's catalog URL, default media type, authors and any specific media types for authors. The publication time period includes publications with an unknown publication time as the unknown time might include the current year.
Installation
To install the latest release from github:
git clone https://github.com/kbalk/booklist.git && cd booklist
python setup.py install
After installation, modify the default configuration file sample_config
,
which is found in the same directory as this README. In particular, the
catlog-url and author list should be edited to specify the appropriate
library and authors of interest. Refer to the
'Configuration File' section for further details.
Prerequisites
This script was written using Python 3.7 and uses:
- Pytest
- PyYAML
- Voluptuous (for validation of YAML data)
- Requests
Unit tests
Unit tests can be invoked using Pytest:
pytest
# Code coverage:
pytest --cov=booklist
Configuration File
The name of the YAML-formatted configuration file is a required argument
to running the booklist
script. The format is as follows:
Tag | Description |
---|---|
catalog-url | Required. Must be a valid URL for a website using the CARL.X Integrated Library System. |
media-type | Optional. The default media type is book; allowed types are listed below. |
authors | Required. List of authors specified by first and last name and optionally by media-type. |
firstname | Required. Sub-tag of 'authors'. First name of author. |
lastname | Required. Sub-tag of 'authors'. Last name of author. |
media-type | Optional. Sub-tag of 'authors'. See list of media types below. |
Allowed media types:
- Book
- Electronic Resource
- eBook
- eAudioBook
- Book on CD
- Large Print
- Music CD
- DVD
- Blu-Ray
Note: The media types can be in upper, lower or mixed case as the case will be ignored. Types that consist of more than one word may be enclosed in quotes or not.
Also, some media types are supersets, i.e., a type of 'book' includes 'large print' books. A type of 'electronic resource' includes 'ebook'.
Example configuration file:
catalog-url: http://catalog.library.loudoun.gov/
media-type: Book
authors:
- firstname: James
lastname: Patterson
media-type: book on cd
- firstname: Alexander
lastname: McCall Smith
Usage
Usage: booklist [-h] [-d] config_file
Search a public library's catalog website for this year's publications
from authors listed in the given config file.
positional arguments:
config_file Config file containing library's catalog url and
list of authors
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-d, --debug Print debug information to stdout
A sample configuration file named sample_config
has been provided with
the distribution. The format of the configuration file is described
here.
Limitations
I wasn't able to determine the version of CARL.X used in my testing, but even so it appears that CARL.X is configurable for the types of filters and media it will permit. Therefore this script may not work for any given CARL.X ILS, but it can be used as a starting point for any needed modifications.