surmavagit / authorsearch

CLI tool to query several online libraries

authorsearch

Search for an author across several library websites.

• quickly search multiple resources from the command line
• each resource is handled concurrently
• results are cached to reduce duplicate requests
• several formatting options
• errors go to standard error stream to allow filtering them out

Quickstart

Here you can install Go, if you don't have it already.

To install locally, first run git clone github.com/surmavagit/authorsearch to clone this repository.

Then run go build to make an executable file and then run it.

As an alternative, you can first install Go and then run go install github.com/surmavagit/authorsearch to install it globally.

Usage

• Run ./authorsearch Lastname to search for an author with this name:

e.g. ./authorsearch Smith will give you results for authors called Smith.

• You can also additionaly specify author's first name or year of birth or year of death to narrow down the results:

e.g. ./authorsearch Smith Adam or ./authorsearch Smith 1790 or ./authorsearch Smith Adam 1723 are all valid requests.

• There are several flags avaliable:

--help, -h shows information about the flags

--verbose, -v shows all results, including resources where nothing was found

--no-description, -d suppresses the description column in the results

--no-numbers, -n suppresses the number column in the results

Featured Libraries

General Purpose

1. OpenLibrary

a project of the Internet Archive, hosts thousands of books on all topics in different formats (picture and text)

2. Project Gutenberg

hosts thousands of books on all topics in html or other text formats

3. OnlineBooksPage

while it doesn't host any books itself, the OnlineBooksPage provides outstanding information on where one can read free public domain texts on all topics

Libraries on the topics of history and political economy:

4. Tokyo Keizai University Institutional Repository - multiple texts (page scan pictures)
5. Marxists Internet Archive - multiple texts not only by Marx, but also by many other authors
6. History of Economic Thought website - information about authors and multiple links to their texts
7. Mcmaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought - multiple texts in txt or pdf formats
8. Site Paulette Taieb - texts in both english and french (originals and translations)