'helper to fetch the set of geonetwork
\'operations\' (privileges)'

def _geonetwork_get_operation_ids(self):

    get_ops_url = ('%sgeonetwork/srv/en/xml.info?%s' % (self.base, urllib.urlencode({'type': 'operations'})))
    request = urllib2.Request(get_ops_url)
    response = self.urlopen(request)
    doc = etree.fromstring(response.read())
    ops = {}
    for op in doc.findall('operations/operation'):
        ops[op.find('name').text.lower()] = op.attrib['id']
    return ops
