I get the feeling that my response won't help if you're not interested in helping people work with bibliographic data outside of a particular ILS. Here are the 4 lines of code I included in my previous email--python reads pretty well so it's not surprising you didn't see them previously: #!/usr/bin/env python from urllib import urlopen from sys import argv url = 'http://lccn.loc.gov/%s/marcxml' % argv[1] print urlopen(url).read() Ok, so with whitespace and the shebang it's 7 lines :-) The point isn't that this code is somehow wonderful or special, but that it's possible to perform similar operations in many different languages using standard libraries. As with HTTP, there are so many tools available for processing XML it's sometimes overwhelming. It would depend on the application I'm writing what data gets extracted. So how long extraction would take is not an question I can answer generally. As for diacritics, everything seems to be its right place, at least xmllint says so. I was surprised to see ISO-8859-1 being used with XML character entities--but it seems fine. At least it's not MARC-8 :-) Take a look at these if you are curious: http://lccn.loc.gov/75960069/marcxml http://lccn.loc.gov/2004386351/marcxml I'm not suggesting this new lccn service replaces or is even better than Z39.50 or SRU. It's clearly just a means for identifying a bibliographic record with a predictable URL--whereas Z39.50 and SRU are about querying a set of bibliographic records. I hope that this didn't muddy the waters more :-) //Ed