December 2008 Archives
Posted on behalf of my colleagues Joanna White and Xiaoming Liu:
WorldCat Registry users now have an option to semi-automatically configure direct links to their catalog for over sixty ILS vendors. Authorized users can provide a sample catalog search link, click a button and receive suggested ISBN, ISSN and OCLC deep links. This guessing service is also available in a stand-alone user-friendly form and as a Web Service provided by xISBN LibLook.
The WorldCat Registry provides an increasing number of links (library catalog links, OpenURL resolvers, etc.) to both WorldCat.org and the WorldCat Search API, as well as to external services like LibX. As more libraries use and maintain their WorldCat Registry information, the service can provide better and more accurate links for syndication.
We are interested to learn about your experiences and how we can support more and better linking.
For more information about the WorldCat Registry see Building the Grid and a short video tutorial on the Registry and how it can help your users connect to your services.
Xiaoming Liu, xISBN and Joanna White, WorldCat Registry
xOCLCNUM has a less-used, but I think very useful feature of limiting search scope to a collection, we call it search in library feature. The goal is to limit FRBR expansion to a smaller scope, such as a library or special collection. Thanks for wonderful help from Jeremy York, we recently added hathitrust.org as a collection.
This feature is implemented in following way: a request can put an additional parameter "library=hathi" in xOCLCNUM request, the service will only return records which marked as free access in hathitrust.org, when I gather hathitrust data last time, we collected 189,723 free access records with OCLCNUM. Similarly, we have 129,239 free access records from Open Content Alliance, and overall there are 322,629 records about ebooks (mostly free content) in xOCLCNUM service.
Besides that, because of the FRBR expansion of xOCLCNUM, when a user requests an OCLCNUM, the service can lookup other OCLCNUM with free access content in same work group, for example, OCLCNUM: 51848364 is a book in copyright, by using the search in a library request, we can tell there are multiple versions of free ebooks about this book, including copies in archive.org and hathitrust.org.
I just did a quick calculation, by using the FRBR expansion, 2,446,005 OCLCNUMs can link to a version of ebook. it is still a small percentage of the worldcat database, but I suspect it might be large enough for real world usage, so it would be nice to see this feature get better usage.
We have a similar feature in xISBN service, but because most free access books don't have ISBNs, the xOCLCNUM's version might be better for real world usage.
xISBN service used to handle ISBN as a plain number, when a hyphenated ISBN is requested, we normalize it to a plain number internally, and present the response in plain number. However, hyphenated ISBNs carry structure information, and sometimes library OPAC system indexed hyphenated ISBN only.
We just deployed a new version of xISBN service with better hyphen support, when requested ISBN is hyphenated, the response ISBNs will be hyphenated as well; we also added additional method of explicitly hyphenating ISBNs, such as:
http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/9780596002817?method=hyphen
It is implemented by downloading the ISBN range HTML file, turn it into a lookup table, and when an ISBN should be hyphenated, we use the lookup table to figure out where to add the hyphen. It is trivial to parse the ISBN range HTML file, but it would be great if ISBN agency has a machine-readable format of this file.
