May 01, 2006
OU Course Code Search on BBC Programme Catalogue
**It's back - the catalogue seems to have returned ***
Last week, the BBC released a beta (err, experimental!;-) version of its Programme Catalogue Search Tool.
The search results don't link to downloads (yet?) but even so, the catalogue is still a fascinating resource. (There are other media archives, of course (e.g. I have bookmarked a fewhere), but some of them are subscription only (e.g. the British Universities Film and Video Council), unlike the BBC offering, which is free).)
As well as providing a normal (human readable) web page of search results, machine readable XML (RDF, actually) results are also available, which makes for easy reuse of results.
Out of curiosity, I tried out one or two searches for the OU (using search terms 'Open University', OU, etc.). As well as the simple/basic search, I found the advanced search page to be very useful.
The most successful search turned up BBC catalogue search (series): OU, which recorded several thousand entries over the last thirty years.
One interesting thing to note is that a search can be made quite effectively for OU course programmes by course code. For example, here's a search for S322:
http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/search/title:s322
That is, just use a query of the form:
http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/search/title:courseCode
I haven't had time to check the OU library to see whether this information is available from any of their catalogues, but I suspect that it isn't(!). No matter - the RDF feed from each catalogue entry page means that the information is available in a form that can be pulled easily enough into any other page if you know the catalogue entry number for a particular programme.
For example, here's a (human readable) catalogue entry page for a T209 programme:
http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/programme/FOUT697F
And here's the machine readable (XML/RDF) result:
http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/xml/programme/FOUT697F
The translation between the two is simple:
Web page: http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/programme/catID
RDF page:http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/xml/programme/catID
However, I haven't (yet) stumbled on a way of making a query to the catalogue that returns an XML response, which makes finding the results so they can be pulled into a page a little harder...
Update: a plea to the BBC Backstage mailing list (backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk) turned up the answer:
If you want to convert your web-based searches into REST-like requests, you want to pick out the "/infax/" in the url and change it to "/xml/" and "/feed/".
So for example, the atom/feed search:
http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/feed/search/dr%20who works fine, as does http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/feed/search/t209
(Just in passing, most of the results I looked at had a catalogue ID that included OU as the second and third characters. Does anyone happen to know what coding scheme was used to generate catalogue numbers?)
On the OUseful search tool, I think when I allowed users to search for books/courses by keyword, the search was applied to book titles as well as course titles. I wonder how easy it would be to use the BBC catalogue info in the same way - for example, allowing users to make a general keyword search and then filtering on results that OU programming to identify courses by coursecode that are somehow keyed by a given keyword?
(Even in the BBC Catalogue Advanced Search, I couldn't find a way of combining arguments, e.g. to allow me to search on title AND series. Does anyone know if this is possible and if so, what the syntax is?) Apparently, Boolean search is not supported at the moment..
Update: It seems as if the BBC Programme Catalogue has been taken down while it is in the 'review phase'....