I’m pissed at the Library of Congress

Today I tried to add a couple of recently purchased books to my library database using my lccn2library script. It failed because the Library of Congress has either moved or deleted the files lccn2library relies on. Let’s say I was trying to add Applied Elasticity by Timoshenko and Lessells.1 If you go to the LoC’s MARC record for the book and click on the Download link, you’ll see a popup that looks like this: So it looks like you can click the MODS link to get the MODS file for the book. That’s the file my script parses to get the information to add to the database. The MODS link for this book is https://lccn.loc.gov/26010978/mods which is the URL form that lccn2library expects. Unfortunately, that link returns an empty file. And not just for that book, but for every book I tried. What does the little northeast-pointing arrow mean? Beats me. You’d think it was an indication that the MODS link was pointing to some external site, but that’s not the case. Maybe I’ve caught the LoC in…