MARCThing is born…
Sweet! Casey Durfee over at LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/thingology/) has created a simple stand-alone MARC/Z39.50 app called MARCThing which makes it easy to connect with Z39.50 servers, suck down MARC records and spit out XML (or other formats) to use in applications. It reportedly works like Solr-Lucene (a ‘magic box’ concept where you just send an http request and get back results). He says “..what I hope is that this inspires people not in the library world to do cool things with library data. It’s sad that working with library data is such a hassle..” (Agreed, and hope it inspires us *in* the library world to do cool things with library data too!)
Best part: the code will be free to libraries and other non-profits (either open source or Creative Commons – they’re deciding now).