Sickle 0.7.0

A lightweight OAI client library for Python

Sickle: OAI-PMH for Humans

Sickle is a lightweight OAI-PMH client library written in Python. It has been designed for conveniently retrieving data from OAI interfaces the Pythonic way:

>>> from sickle import Sickle
>>> sickle = Sickle('http://elis.da.ulcc.ac.uk/cgi/oai2')
>>> records = sickle.ListRecords(metadataPrefix='oai_dc')
>>> records.next()
<Record oai:eprints.rclis.org:4088>

Features

• Easy harvesting of OAI-compliant interfaces
• Support for all six OAI verbs
• Convenient object representations of OAI items (records, headers, sets, …)
• Automatic de-serialization of Dublin Core-encoded metadata payloads to Python dictionaries
• Option for ignoring deleted items

Installation

pip install sickle

Dependencies:

• requests
• lxml

Documentation

Documentation is available at Read the Docs

Development

• Sickle @ GitHub

Changelog

Version 0.7.0

May 17, 2020

• method for record metadata extraction has been extracted (Record.get_metadata()) to make subclassing easier (https://github.com/mloesch/sickle/pull/38)
• retryable HTTP status codes and default wait time between retries can be customized (https://github.com/mloesch/sickle/issues/21 https://github.com/mloesch/sickle/pull/41)
• retry logic has been fixed: max_retries parameter now refers to no. of retries, not counting the initial request anymore
• the default number of HTTP retries has been set to 0 (= no retries)
• fix for https://github.com/mloesch/sickle/pull/39

Version 0.6.5

January 12, 2020

• fix: repr methods where causing an exception on Python 3 (https://github.com/mloesch/sickle/issues/30)

Version 0.6.4

October 2, 2018

• fix: resumption token with empty body indicates last response (https://github.com/mloesch/sickle/issues/25)

Version 0.6.3

April 8, 2018

• fix unicode problems (issues 20 & 22)

Version 0.6.2

August 11, 2017

• missing datestamp and identifier elements in record header don’t break harvesting
• lxml resolve_entities disabled (http://lxml.de/FAQ.html#how-do-i-use-lxml-safely-as-a-web-service-endpoint)

Version 0.6.1

November 13, 2016

• it is now possible to pass any keyword arguments to requests
• the encoding used to decode the server response can be overridden

Version 0.5

November 12, 2015

• support for Python 3
• consider resumption tokens with empty tag bodies

Version 0.4

May 31, 2015

• bug fix: resumptionToken parameter is exclusive
• added support for harvesting complete OAI-XML responses

Version 0.3

April 17, 2013

• added support for protected OAI interfaces (basic authentication)
• made class mapping for OAI elements configurable
• added options for HTTP timeout and max retries
• added handling of HTTP 503 responses

Version 0.2

February 26, 2013

• OAI items are now represented as their own classes instead of XML elements
• library raises OAI-specific exceptions
• made lxml a required dependency

Version 0.1

February 20, 2013

First public release.