sruthi

sruthi is a client for python to make SRU requests (Search/Retrieve via URL).

Currently only SRU 1.2 is supported.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Usage
  • searchretrieve operation
  • explain operation
• Schemas
• Release

Installation

sruthi is available on PyPI, so to install it simply use:

$ pip install sruthi

Usage

See the examples directory for more scripts.

searchretrieve operation

import sruthi

records = sruthi.searchretrieve('https://suche.staatsarchiv.djiktzh.ch/SRU/', query='Zurich')

for record in records:
    # print fields from schema
    print(record['reference'])
    print(record['title'])
    print(record['date'])
    print(record['extra']['link']) # extra record data is available at the 'extra' key

# you can get more information at each step
import sruthi

# note: records is an iterator
records = sruthi.searchretrieve('https://suche.staatsarchiv.djiktzh.ch/SRU/', query='Human')
print(records.sru_version)
print(records.count)

for record in records:
    print(record)
    print(record['schema'])

The return value of searchretrieve is iterable, so you can easily loop over it. Or you can use indices to access elements, e.g. records[1] to get the second elemenet, or records[-1] to get the last one.

Even slicing is supported, so you can do things like only iterate over the first 5 elements using

for records in records[:5]:
   print(record)

explain operation

import sruthi

info = sruthi.explain('https://suche.staatsarchiv.djiktzh.ch/SRU/')
print(info.server)
print(info.database)
print(info.index)
print(info.schema)

Schemas

sruthi does not make any assumptions about the record data schema. The data is provided as-is (as a flattend dict). sruthi has been tested with the following schemas:

• Dublin Core Record Schema (dc)
• MARCXML: The MARC 21 XML Schema (marcxml)
• ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description, Second edition (isad)

Release

To create a new release, follow these steps (please respect Semantic Versioning):

1. Adapt the version number in sruthi/__init__.py
2. Update the CHANGELOG with the version
3. Create a pull request to merge develop into master (make sure the tests pass!)
4. Create a new release/tag on GitHub (on the master branch)
5. The publication on PyPI happens via GitHub Actions on every tagged commit