bib2bibframe

Overview

Commandline tool to convert Cornell bibliographic IDs to Bibframe RDF.

Script name: bib2bibframe.rb
Input: a comma-delimited list of bib record ids
Output: MARCXML and Bibframe RDF files

The MARCXML is retrieved from the Cornell Library database. The Bibframe RDF is generated using the LC Bibframe converter.

Configuration settings

To configure the script, copy conf.example.yml to conf.yml. Specify the following configuration settings. All settings are optional, and can be overridden by commandline arguments. Some settings (see below) also define default values in the application if they are specified neither in the config file nor on the commandline.

• baseuri: Namespace the Bibframe converter will use to mint URIs.

• catalog: Catalog URL for lookups. The catalog is assumed to support use of the .marcxml extension to request marcxml. A future update will include marc2marcxml conversion if the catalog doesn't support this.

• format: Specifies rdf serialization format. Defaults to rdfxml. Possible values are determined by Bibframe converter. A future update will include an option for turtle output.

  • rdfxml: (default) flattened RDF/XML, everything has an identifier
  • rdfxml-raw: verbose, cascaded output
  • ntriples
  • json

• datadir: Directory to which MARCXML and Bibframe files will be written. The application will create this directory if it doesn't already exist. Each time the script runs, it will use the current datetime to create a subdirectory of the data directory, with further subdirectories marcxml and bibframe to store the xml and rdf output files, respectively. The bibframe directory is further partitioned by format.

• logdir: Directory to which runtime logs are written. Note: these log messages are also written to $stdout.

Runtime arguments

Bib ids must be specified on the commandline. All other arguments are optional, and can be specified in the config file rather than the commandline. See above for descriptions of these arguments.

--ids: Comma-delimited list of Cornell bib ids or 'file:' followed by the relative path to a newline-delimited file of bib ids.

--conf: Path (including filename) to configuration file.

See the corresponding config file options for description of the following:

--baseuri
--catalog
--format
--datadir
--logdir

Default values

The ids, baseuri and catalog arguments have no programmatic default values. The other arguments have the following defaults:

conf_file: conf/conf.yml, relative to the current script format: rdfxml
datadir: ./data
logdir: ./log

Warning: there is currently no error-checking for missing required values or the format and content of any specified values.

Sample commands

$ ./bib2bibframe.rb --ids=102063,1413966,152071 $ ./bib2bibframe.rb --ids=file:/usr/local/bibids.txt
$ ./bib2bibframe.rb --baseuri=http://example.com --format=json --ids=102063,1413966,152071