Importing biblios.net records into Inmagic Genie

‡biblios.net from LibLime was launched at the ALA Midwinter meeting in Denver last week. It is a free browser-based cataloging service with a data store containing over 30 million records. Records are licensed under the Open Data Commons, making the service the world's largest repository of freely-licensed library records.  For additional information you can also listen to a podcast with the LibLime CEO, Josh Ferraro.

The site features a very clean, easy to use interface with options to select target libraries and refine search results by authors, publishers, subjects and dates. ‡biblios.net also offers the ability to export records in MARC XML, and in my tests so far, this data imports nicely into Genie in the Inmagic Library Suite. To see the level of detail in the default upload, check out our Genie demo site and search for "Torts" in the Anyword box.  

The built in ability in Genie to upload BookWhere generated MARC XML can be used to also upload ‡biblios.net records. BookWhere users will miss features such as the rating of the quality of the MARC records. However ‡biblios.net provides libraries that don't use BookWhere with another option for obtaining high quality catalog records.  As for BookWhere records, the XSL file included with Genie can be modified to include additional MARC fields if needed, for example no call numbers are added by default, but the XSL can be edited to add whichever MARC tag is appropriate for the classification scheme in use.