RIS, MARC, SRU, DOI — in plain words

RIS

A simple text format for exchanging bibliographic records. Each line is a tag and a value: AU for author, TI for title, PY for year. Zotero, Citavi and EndNote understand it. In Katlog a saved list can be exported to RIS with one click.

MARC 21

The international standard for machine-readable cataloguing. Fields are identified by numbers: 245 is the title, 100 the author, 260 or 264 the publication details. National libraries store their records this way. Katlog parses MARC when looking up a description by ISBN; importing MARC files is planned.

SRU

A way to query a library catalogue over the internet and get a standardised answer. Through SRU, Katlog asks DNB, K10plus and the Library of Congress: “what do you know about this ISBN?”

ISBN

The International Standard Book Number: 10 or 13 digits. The last digit is a check digit calculated from the others, so a typo in an ISBN can be detected immediately, before any search.

DOI

A persistent identifier for an article, chapter or dataset, such as 10.1038/171737a0. A DOI link doesn’t break even if a journal moves its website. DOI metadata is held by Crossref.

GND

The Integrated Authority File (Gemeinsame Normdatei) of German-speaking libraries: standard forms of names, organisations and subjects. Subjects in DNB descriptions arrive as GND terms.

JSON

A data format convenient for software: each record is a set of “field: value” pairs. Our Aleph export for development was in JSON.

Call number

A book’s address on the shelf: a section of the classified shelving scheme plus a number within it, such as F 759. More in “The call number as a spine label”.

CSRF

Cross-site request forgery: an attack in which another site tries to perform an action on behalf of a logged-in user. The defence is a secret token that only an open tab of the site itself knows. A poorly tuned version of this defence once broke record deletion — see “Error 415”.

AI agent

A program based on a language model that doesn’t just answer but does the work itself: writes code, runs tests, edits files. Katlog was written by such an agent from our briefs.