Unbelievably, librarians do make mistakes. MARC records has typos, or a MARC record for a different publication date was attached to the book. For example, we have an author named Fkorence A Huxley, but her name is really Florence. Not according to the MARC record, though! Fat finger errors don’t just happen on phones. Another example: we scanned a book originally published in 1924, and *republished* in 1971. We have the 1971 version. But the MARC record tells us it’s from 1924.
Essentially, our search is only as good as whatsapp lead our metadata. If there are typos, or the wrong MARC record, or wrong data, our search and/or filtering will not be accurate.
Commercial APIs Are Not Built to Solve Library Problems
Amazon’s API is built to sell books to end users. Yes, it helps you find a particular book, but the other data the API contains about availability, formats and pricing is less accurate. Because the Section 108(h) exemption for libraries (read more here) involves knowing whether copies are being sold at reasonable prices, we need to know about these aspects of the book to determine whether they qualify. But Amazon’s API is incomplete in this area. So we found ourselves needing to use the API to find a match for the title and author, and then go to the page and scrape it to actually get accurate availability and pricing information.
