I’m pissed at the Library of Congress

Today I tried to add a couple of recently purchased books to my library database using my lccn2library script. It failed because the Library of Congress has either moved or deleted the files lccn2library relies on.

Let’s say I was trying to add Applied Elasticity by Timoshenko and Lessells. If you go to the LoC’s MARC record for the book and click on the Download link, you’ll see a popup that looks like this:

So it looks like you can click the MODS link to get the MODS file for the book. That’s the file my script parses to get the information to add to the database. The MODS link for this book is

https://lccn.loc.gov/26010978/mods

which is the URL form that lccn2library expects. Unfortunately, that link returns an empty file. And not just for that book, but for every book I tried. What does the little northeast-pointing arrow mean? Beats me. You’d think it was an indication that the MODS link was pointing to some external site, but that’s not the case.

Maybe I’ve caught the LoC in the middle of a transition to a new system for storing records in various formats. Maybe I’ll return in a month or two to find that everything is working again—perhaps with new URLs for the different formats. I hope so.

But until that hoped-for day, I’m pissed at the LoC because I have to add books to my database by hand using the sqlite3 interactive command-line tool. Which is slow but not terrible, especially since I’m adding only a book or two at a time.

The command to add a new book to the database is

INSERT INTO book(title, subtitle, volume, edition, publisher, published, lccn, loc, added)
VALUES();

The book will be assigned an ID automatically. To get it, I run

SELECT id,title FROM book WHERE added IS "2026-10-08";

The first field in the output will be the ID. The date must be a string with the current date in yyyy-mm-dd format.

The new book may be written by an author already in the database. To check if that’s the case, I run

SELECT * FROM author WHERE name LIKE "%%";

If the author’s already in the database, that command will return their ID. If not, it returns nothing. I then run

INSERT INTO author(name) VALUES("");

and then the SELECT command above to get the author’s ID.

The final step is to add a record to the book_author table to tie the book and author together. That’s

INSERT INTO book_author(book_id, author_id) VALUES(, );

As I said, this is slow because it’s several steps, but none of the steps are difficult.

What will I do if the LoC never fixes the problem of the missing MODS files? I suppose I could parse the MARC records, which are still accessible, but that would be a pain in the ass. Maybe I’ll build a little interactive script where I can just type in the necessary information and have the script generate and run the SQL commands. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

1. It’d be so cool to have this book. It was written when Timoshenko had just come to the US and was working at Westinghouse before landing a teaching gig at the University of Michigan. Sadly, this was not one of the books I was adding to my library.