Catalogue

Which treasures does the Austrian National Library have in store? Use the online catalogue to search for title, author, date of publication, keyword and other metadata within most collections of the library. Some of those are modern and historical books, manuscripts, papyri, maps, globes, handwritten and printed sheet music. It is possible to use the catalogue manually via https://search.onb.ac.at or to use the following interfaces to access it using code:

The Austrian National Library uses Alma and provides bibliographic Metadata via SRU and OAI-PMH. SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) permits targeted searches within the Catalogue based on well established internet standards. OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) on the other hand is used for collecting metadata.

The catalogue is searchable via URLs and a Python library. Requests are formulated in CQL (Contextual Query Language) and are added to the base URL. To simply retrieve a bibliographic record one of the following identifiers is needed:

• Metadata Management System ID (MMS-ID),
  
• AC-Number or
  
• Barcode.
  

The base URL for SRU requests is: https://obv-at-oenb.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/view/sru/43ACC_ONB, e.g. https://obv-at-oenb.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/view/sru/43ACC_ONB?version=1.2&query=alma.local_control_field_009=AC14251814&operation=searchRetrieve.

Detailed information regarding SRU is provided by Ex Libris and the Library of Congress.

The following table contains four example requests:

Using this interface you can download your own local copy of the online catalogue of the Austrian National Library. You can copy either specific subsets or the entire catalogue. The copies can be kept up to date using a process called harvesting.

The Austrian National Library provides the following sets via the OAI‑PMH base URL:

https://eu02.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/view/oai/43ACC_ONB/request

HOWTOs and Jupyter Notebooks