method of querying MELVYL

Foxpond Hollow has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi all. I have an obscure problem that I may end up having to solve from the ground up, but hopefully not. I work in the University of California library system, and use the MELVYL database (link below) heavily. MELVYL is the library catalog system for the UC system and is MARC formatted. It used to have telnet access, but unfortunately that was discontinued a couple years ago. What I'm wondering (hoping) is, does anyone know of a module currently existing that can query MELVYL? I haven't been able to find one myself, so if one doesn't exist, what should I be looking at in terms of querying this thing manually? I assume I'll need a combination of the LWP and MARC modules, but if anyone has any tips it'd be appreciated. Thanks.

MELVYL website: http://melvyl.cdlib.org/F

Comment on method of querying MELVYL

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Re: method of querying MELVYL by Old_Gray_Bear (Bishop) on Aug 04, 2009 at 18:54 UTC
A Google search on 'melvyl api' generated a hit on an article that discusses the mechanics of Melvyl: "For our initial implementation of the Google Book Search API (application programming interface), CDL integrated the API features into the Melvyl Catalog at the brief record display level." This might give you a starting point for the API. For the actual MARC code, there is MARC-Record, which also may be a good starting point (the last updated field says '2007'). ---- I Go Back to Sleep, Now. OGB	[reply]
Re: method of querying MELVYL by ig (Vicar) on Aug 04, 2009 at 21:48 UTC
Your own IT department should be your best source of information. If there are Perl modules available, they probably know about them. As developer and provider of the application and database, they should be able to tell you how best to access them.	[reply]