Introduction

As some of you may know, I’ve been a ham (amateur) radio operator since 1999, holding the call sign N4IXT. I’m a member of several clubs, including the Birmingham Amateur Radio Club, the Shelby County Amateur Radio Club (where I’m also the webmaster), and the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL), in which I am a life member.

More importantly for this post, I am a member of the Alabama Historical Radio Society. We are beginning a project to catalog our exhibits and library into cloud based software named PastPerfect. As part of this effort we’ll be entering data for our extensive library into the software.

Naturally we want to automate as much of this as possible, since the collection is rather extensive. Some of our books are so old they have neither an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) or a Library of Congress Catalog Number (LCCN for short). Others have only the LCCN, the newer books have an ISBN, and a very few have both.

In the process of meeting with other museums I learned this is a need for many other organizations. So I decided to do something about it.

I plan to create a PowerShell module with cmdlets that can retrieve book metadata, such as title, author, and the like. This module will then be made available as on open source project on my website so other groups can use it as well.

As a source a user can pass in either an ISBN or LCCN number, or better yet pipe in an entire list of numbers from a text file, and generate book data.

The sources we’ll use are the Library of Congress and the Open Library site, which is part of the Internet Archive. Both provide web APIs we can use to retrieve data, and we’ll document that information in upcoming posts.

Why PowerShell?

You may be wondering why I chose PowerShell for this project. There were several good reasons.

First, and people often forget this, PowerShell is multi-platform. It can run on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. If you want to learn more on this you should watch my Pluralsight course PowerShell 7 Quick Start for Developers on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Next, the PowerShell code is viewable by anyone. Any user can download the code and easily examine it before running. This should address security concerns by many organizations.

The third reason is readability. As many will point out, there are other languages such as Python that will meet the above needs. In general though, code from other languages can be hard to read and execute for people who aren’t developers. I’m imagining my module will be used by many people with only a basic understanding of tech. As such a simple command like Get-BookByISBN -ISBN 1234567890 will be much easier to use.

Finally, well hey I just love PowerShell! As I need to turn this project around quickly I wanted to use something I already know and love.

The Plan

In the next two posts I will cover what ISBNs and LCCNs are, and the web APIs (Application Programming Interface) that we’ll use to get the data.

I’ll then begin a series of posts documenting the PowerShell code needed to retrieve the book data, and how you can use the book data for your organization.

The series will wrap up with the creation of the ArcaneBooks PowerShell Module, and its publication to my Github site.

Kusto Will Return!

For those of you who have been following Kusto Query Language series over the last few years, don’t worry it will return! I’m just taking a short diversion for the next month or so to document this project. Then we’ll return to the world of Kusto.

Conclusion

In this post I established the groundwork for my new ArcaneBooks PowerShell project. In the next few posts we’ll cover terms and data sources, then look at the PowerShell code needed to achieve our results.

I have a long series of blog posts on PowerShell, you’ll find them listed at my Fun With PowerShell Roundup

If you want to take a deeper dive into PowerShell, I have many PowerShell courses at Pluralsight, you’ll find them listed on my About Me page.

One course that may be especially helpful is my Pluralsight course PowerShell 7 Quick Start for Developers on Linux, macOS and Windows, as it dives into the creation of functions, modules, and more.

If you don’t have a Pluralsight subscription, just go to my list of courses on Pluralsight . At the top is a Try For Free button you can use to get a free 10 day subscription to Pluralsight, with which you can watch my courses, or any other course on the site.