Request ISNI

Python scripts to perform ISNI requests via a provided AtomPub API and report the outcome in CSV files.

ISNI is the ISO 27729:2012 standard name identifier that uniquely identifies public entities who contributed to creative works. As an ISNI registration agency, the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) can request ISNI identifiers from the ISNI central database.

The scripts of this repository are used to perform such requests against the ISNI AtomPub API: each request is one XML file containing the local KBR identifier of a public entity, the response XML files are stored, and a CSV report is generated showing the outcome of the performed requests, for example the newly assigned ISNI identifiers.

Usage

Create and activate a Python virtual environment

# Create a new Python virtual environment
python3 -m venv py-request-isni-env

# Activate the virtual environment
source py-request-isni-env/bin/activate

# Install dependencies
pip -r requirements.txt

Given that you have correctly formatted ISNI request XML files in the folder my-requests, you can call the script in the following way to obtain response XML files in the folder my-responses and a report at overview.csv.

python request_isni.py \
    --url https://isni-m.oclc.org:/ATOM/isni?
    --input-folder my-requests \
    --response-folder my-responses \
    --output-file overview.csv

Please note, that you should be an ISNI member to use this API. If your IP is not whitelisted you will receive HTTP error messages.

Instead of providing the URL via commandline parameter, you can also create a .env file with the following content: ISNI_ATOM_URL=https://isni-m.oclc.org:/ATOM/isni?.

Software tests

Functions in lib.py contain doctests, additionally there is an overal testfile test_request_isni.py to test the script request_isni.py. The code coverage can be computed by executing the following commands (generated HTML files will highlight which paths in the code were not covered by the tests).

# compute the code coverage from within the directory request_isni
coverage run test_request_isni.py`

# generate a human-friendly report in HTML
coverage html

License

The license of this software was chosen using https://ufal.github.io/public-license-selector and based on licenses of software libraries used by this repo:

Library	Description	License
certifi	Providing the list of Mozilla's carefully curated collection of Root certificates, such that we can communicate securely with the ISNI server via https.	MPL 2.0
charset-normalizer	A library to help reading text from an unknown charset encoding, this library is used by the requests library we are using.	MIT
idna	A library to handle internationalized domain names. It is used by urllib3 and therefore indirectly by our project .	BSD 3-clause
python-dotenv	Functionality to load a .env environment file and make the environment variables accessible in Python. We use this library to provide the functionality of specifying the ISNI API URL in an environment variable instead of via a commandline parameter.	BSD 3-clause
requests	We use this library to perform HTTP requests against the ISNI APIs.	Apache 2.0
urllib3	Used by the requests library to make requests, thus implicitly used to make API requests against the ISNI APIs.	MIT

Contact

Sven Lieber - Sven.Lieber@kbr.be - Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) - https://www.kbr.be/en/