[Web4lib] capturing data from Amazon in an Access database

[Michael E. Bahr]

It's been a few years since I played with Amazon....  But I believe that Amazon offers this information as a webservice, consumable by making soap requests.  

What this means is that if you have someone on staff with Visual Basic programming skills, you can grab the information using a VB program that runs within Excel.

-Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Leslie Johnston
Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2007 8:28 AM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] capturing data from Amazon in an Access database

A kludgy way might be to use the "Add to Library Thing" Firefox extension, build your set in LT, and take advantage of LIT's tab-delimited export.  It comes out in a table with categorized rows representing LT's structure for the records.

Leslie

At 05:36 AM 7/3/2007, John Fitzgibbon wrote:
>Hi,
>
>In the old days when we compiled order lists we used Whitaker's Books 
>in Print on Cd-Rom and this allowed us to save a record into a text 
>file with fields delimited by commas and records delimited by carriage 
>returns. I believe that the US equivalent, Bowker, offered the same 
>functionality.
>
>Now, we are using Amazon more and more. However, when we find a record 
>in Amazon there is no easy way of saving it into Access or Excel.
>
>I don't think XML along with XSLT can be used because authors, titles, 
>and prices are not indicated with any special tags on the 'wish list' 
>or 'shopping cart' pages of Amazon. For example, authors are not 
>delineated with <span class='author'> or some such tag.
>
>Also, there is no RSS feed which would provide us with a ready made XML 
>page of the results.
>
>Copying and pasting into Excel seems very cumbersome.
>
>When I first considered some solutions to the problem the problem 
>seemed very trivial but now, that these solutions won't work, I am at a loss.
>
>If only more web pages were based on XML...
>
>I would welcome any ideas.
>
>Regards
>John
>
>John Fitzgibbon
>
>p: 00 353 91 562471
>f: 00 353 91 565039
>w: http://www.galwaylibrary.ie
>
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------------
Leslie Johnston
Head, Digital Access Services
University of Virginia Library
http://lib.virginia.edu/digital/
http://lib.virginia.edu/digital/das/
johnston at virginia.edu 

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