OCLC Introduces an API for Anyone to Access Book Data

Posted on December 16, 2009 by Peter Murray

OCLC announced on Monday the availability of a new API for querying the WorldCat database: the WorldCat Basic API. This is a big deal — it opens up part of the metadata in WorldCat to anyone who wants it (for non-commercial purposes). Previously, access to WorldCat data through the developer network was limited to institutions that are members of OCLC. Data returned includes text strings for author names and book titles, ISBN and OCLC identifiers, a link to the HTML display of the record on WorldCat.org, and an optional HTML-formatted citation.

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Fronting Tomcat with Apache HTTPD to Remove Ports and Context Paths

Posted on September 19, 2007 by Peter Murray

In this How-To guide, I show a combination of software and configuration to clean up URLs by removing the port numbers of the Java servlet engine (Tomcat) and the context path of the application. The goal is to create “cool URLs” that are are short (removing the unnecessary context path) and follow conventions (using the default port “80″ rather than “8080″). OhioLINK also uses a custom access control module — built for Apache HTTPD — which makes the fronting of Apache HTTPD for Tomcat even more desirable.

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