Search a library catalog using the SRU searchRetrieve protocol with a CQL query
domain: loc.gov · 4 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Identify the target catalog's SRU base URL and the record schema it supports (e.g., MARCXML, Dublin Core)
Build a CQL query combining an index, relation, and search term (e.g., title all "climate change")
Send a GET request to the SRU endpoint with operation=searchRetrieve, version, query, and maximumRecords parameters
Parse the returned XML searchRetrieveResponse for numberOfRecords and the record set
Known gotchas
SRU 1.2 and SRU 2.0 differ in required parameters and version negotiation; some catalogs only support the older 1.2 dialect, and a version mismatch produces a diagnostic error rather than results
Supported CQL indexes and relations are catalog-specific, so there is no universal index name guaranteed to work across all SRU targets
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