catena/crates/bibfetch/README.md

bibfetch

What a catalogue says about an identifier, asked of the body that assigns it.

Part of catena.

What it does

idnorm can tell you a DOI is well formed. It cannot tell you the paper exists — that is not a fact about the string, it is a fact about the world, and the only way to learn it is to ask somebody who keeps a register.

So this asks, and that is the only thing it does.

When you would use it

• Auditing a bibliography. A well-formed DOI that no register has is a mistyped one, and a catalogue can carry it for years without noticing.
• Filling in a reference you have only the identifier for.
• Before citing something, to check the year and the authors are what you think they are.
• Cataloguing a book that came with no identifier, to find the editions a register has under its title, and an ISBN to file it by.

Install

cargo install --git https://git.pumpin.online/funkpower/catena bibfetch

Example

$ printf '10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433\narXiv:2401.01234\n978-0-306-40615-7\n' | idnorm | bibfetch --polite [email protected]
{"v":1,"id":"10.1093/mind/lix.236.433","kind":"doi","found":true,"source":"crossref","title":"I.—COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE","authors":["A. M. TURING"],"year":1950,"container":"Mind"}
{"v":1,"id":"2401.01234","kind":"arxiv","found":true,"source":"arxiv","title":"Mixture cure semiparametric additive hazard models under partly interval censoring -- a penalized likelihood approach","authors":["Jinqing Li","Jun Ma"],"year":2024,"container":"arXiv","summary":"Survival analysis can sometimes involve individuals who will not experience…"}
{"v":1,"id":"9780306406157","kind":"isbn","found":true,"source":"openlibrary","title":"Error-correction coding for digital communications","year":1981,"container":"Plenum Press"}

The ones nobody has:

$ printf '10.9999/definitely-not-a-real-doi\n' | idnorm | bibfetch
{"v":1,"id":"10.9999/definitely-not-a-real-doi","kind":"doi","found":false,"source":"crossref"}
$ echo $?
1

Absence is the useful answer here. It is what tells a catalogue that a DOI it has been carrying for three years was mistyped on the way in.

Auditing a whole bibliography:

idnorm --quiet refs.txt | bibfetch --polite [email protected] \
  | jq -r 'select(.found | not) | "missing: \(.id)"'

Options

Option	Effect
--polite <EMAIL>	An address to put in the request. The registers ask for one and answer faster when they get it
--timeout <SECONDS>	How long to wait on a register. Default 20
--attempts <COUNT>	How many times to ask before believing a failure. Default 3
--man	Write this page as a manual page, in roff

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	Every identifier was found
1	At least one was not
64	The command line was wrong
65	The input was not identifier records
69	A register could not be reached
74	The file could not be read

Exit 1 is an answer — the register replied and does not have it. Exit 69 is a failure — nobody replied, and the identifier may be perfectly good.

The registers

Kind	Asked of	Why that one
doi	Crossref	It assigns most scholarly DOIs
arxiv	the arXiv	Its own register of preprints
isbn	OpenLibrary's edition record, then its index, then Google Books	Books, without a key

One register is enough for a DOI or a preprint: the body that assigns the identifier is the only one that has it. A book is different. An ISBN is assigned by a publisher and recorded by whoever gets round to it, so an answer that names the book but not who wrote it is common — OpenLibrary's edition record names its authors by key rather than by name, and its index names them. So the registers are asked in turn and the first complete answer wins. An incomplete one is kept in case nothing better comes, and a register being down is a failure only when every register is.

Google Books is asked last because it answers anonymous callers only until a daily quota runs out, after which it replies 429 to everyone sharing the address.

An ISSN has no register that answers without a key, so it is not looked up on its own. A journal's ISSN comes back on the works published in it instead.

A failure is retried, waiting a second and then two: long enough for a register that is rate-limiting, short enough that one which is simply down does not hold up a pipeline. An answer this cannot read is not retried, because it will not read any better next time.

Covers

bibfetch cover 978-0-306-40615-7 -o cover.jpg

Fetches a book's cover from Open Library's covers store by its ISBN and writes the image. The thirteen-digit form is asked first and the ten-digit form second, because a book is often filed under only one of them; an ISBN whose check digit is wrong is asked about as written, since converting it would give another book's number. --cover-id names an Open Library cover id to ask by last, which is what the cover_id field of a lookup record holds: the first cover in Open Library's record of that edition, never the cover its index picked for the whole work, which is often another edition's. The cover id is asked only when every form of the ISBN asked was answered with no cover; if asking by ISBN failed, that failure is the result.

What comes back is checked before it is written: a JPEG or PNG by its bytes as well as by what the server says, no larger than ten megabytes, reached in at most three redirects, each over HTTPS to covers.openlibrary.org, archive.org or a host under archive.org, and never to an address by number. One request is made at a time, a 429 or 503 is waited out for as long as its Retry-After says, up to a minute, and the whole fetch, every attempt and redirect included, stops after two minutes. The two minutes start once it is the fetch's turn, so a fetch queued behind others in the same process can wait that long again first.

Open Library allows a hundred covers by ISBN every five minutes from one address, and refuses the rest with 403. Covers asked by ISBN are kept three seconds apart across the whole process (Covers::pace), which stays under that limit however long a run goes. A refusal all the same is not mistaken for an outage: the other form of the ISBN is not asked, the cover id is, because Open Library does not limit those, and with no cover found that way the fetch fails with Error::Limited, which means ask again later.

Option	Effect
-o, --output <FILE>	Where to write the image
--size <SIZE>	small, medium or large. Default large
--cover-id <ID>	An Open Library cover id to ask by when the ISBN has none

Exit 0 the cover was written, 1 Open Library has none, 65 the argument was not an ISBN or the answer was not an image, 69 Open Library could not be reached, 74 the file could not be written, 75 Open Library refused for being asked too often and will answer later.

From Rust, bibfetch::cover(&agent, isbn, cover_id, size) returns Ok(None) when there is no cover, and a Cover with the bytes, the media type and the address asked when there is.

Searching by title

$ bibfetch search --title 'The First World War' --author Howard --limit 2
{"v":1,"id":"9780192853622","kind":"isbn","found":true,"source":"openlibrary","title":"The First World War","authors":["Michael Eliot Howard"],"year":2002,"container":"Oxford University Press","subjects":["World War, 1914-1918"],"language":"eng","cover_id":1123124}
{"v":1,"id":"9780199205592","kind":"isbn","found":true,"source":"openlibrary","title":"The First World War: A Very Short Introduction","authors":["Michael Howard"],"year":2007,"container":"Oxford University Press","language":"eng","cover_id":14606475}

A book that arrives as a file often has no identifier to ask about, only a title and perhaps a name. This asks which books a register has under those, and prints one record per candidate: Open Library's index first, and Google Books only when Open Library has nothing.

Each candidate is one edition. Open Library's index answers with works, and names the edition of each that best matches the search. The ISBN, publisher, language, year and cover are that edition's and no other's: a field the edition does not give is left out rather than filled from the work, whose publishers, years and ISBNs belong to all its editions at once. Only the title, the authors and the subjects, which describe the work, are the work's. Open Library's index gives no length for an edition, so its candidates carry no pages. Google Books answers with volumes, which are editions already.

Field	When the candidate has an ISBN	When it has none
id	The first ISBN of the edition whose check digit agrees, in thirteen digits; one written in thirteen is taken over one written in ten	The register's own key: an Open Library id such as OL37863121M for the edition, or OL267171W for the work when no edition was named; a Google Books volume id
kind	isbn	olid for Open Library, googlebooks for Google Books

A work the index names no edition of, or names one it gives neither an ISBN nor a key for, is a candidate named by the work's key, with its title, authors and subjects and nothing an edition would say.

An ISBN whose check digit is wrong is passed over rather than corrected, and Google's shelfmarks, typed OTHER, are not read as ISBNs even when their digits would pass for one. A record of kind isbn can be handed straight back to bibfetch for everything the registers say about that edition; olid and googlebooks are names no lookup here answers about.

cover_id is the same thing it is in a lookup record: the first cover in Open Library's record of the edition the record names, by that edition's ISBN or its key, so bibfetch cover --cover-id fetches that edition's cover and no other. The cover the index picked for the whole work is never asked for, because it is often another edition's. Google Books knows nothing of Open Library's covers and gives none.

The candidates are what the register said, in the order it said them. This makes no judgement about which one is the book in hand, and keeps one that is plainly another book, because a title is not an identifier: The Hamlet comes back for Hamlet. Deciding whether a candidate is the same work is a comparison of titles, and bibclean's same_work is one.

bibfetch search --title 'Anathem' --author Stephenson \
  | jq -r 'select(.kind == "isbn") | .id' | head -1

Open Library having nothing is an answer only once Google Books has been asked and has nothing either. When Google Books cannot be reached, the search fails rather than say no register has the title, and when it refuses for its quota (403, or 429 on every attempt) the failure says so and the command exits 75. Open Library being down is a failure only when Google Books has nothing to offer in its place. Each is asked the same way a lookup asks, retried with the same waits, except that a 403 from Google Books is not asked again. Open Library is sent the title and the author as written; Google Books is sent each word as its own intitle: or inauthor: term, so nothing in a title is read as search syntax.

Option	Effect
--title <TITLE>	The title, or as much of it as you have
--author <AUTHOR>	An author's name, or part of one
--limit <COUNT>	The most candidates to print, 1 to 40. Default 10

Exit 0 at least one candidate was printed, 1 no register has the title, 65 the title was empty, 69 a register that had to answer could not be reached, 74 the output could not be written, 75 Google Books refused for its quota.

From Rust, bibfetch::search(&agent, title, author, limit, attempts) returns the candidates, empty when no register has the title.

Reaching the network

This and emb are the only two tools here that do. Both say so in --help, and for both it is the whole of what they do rather than something that happens on the way to something else — which is the condition under which the contract allows it at all.

Nothing is cached, nothing is stored but a cover you asked to have written, and nothing is sent but the identifier, or the title and author searched for, and the address you pass to --polite.

See also

• idnorm — reading the identifier in the first place.
• bibclean — the rest of a catalogue record, and whether a candidate is the same work.