January 2009 Archives

My name is Andy Dale and I am a new member of the OCLC team. I am honored to have been invited to add my voice to the OCLC blogs. My title at OCLC is Consulting Software Engineer, Identity Management and Authentication.

Over the last couple of years there has been a race to put the suffix '2.0' on every concept known to man. Tim O'Rielly is often credited with first coining the term Web 2.0 back in 2003 and since then it's been a rush to the door 2.0. One of the 2.0's that I have been very involved with is Identity 2.0 and I am now starting to work to see how Identity 2.0 and Library 2.0 interact.

In my blog posts I will try to introduce some of the concepts behind Identity 2.0 and how they might be leveraged to enhance the library experience. My knowledge of Identity technology and policy is deep; my knowledge of how things REALLY work in libraries is nascent at best. I will speculate and hypothesize about the collision of the ideas that drive Identity 2.0 and the use-cases and pain-points of working libraries. I look to you, the readers of this blog, to help correct my misunderstandings and help me find the points where my particular knowledge can be leveraged to add value to library software implementation.

Some of the things that I will blog about soon are: OpenID, Information Cards, Claims Based Authorization, Single Sign-On and Federated Authentication. At times I will write high level explanations of the concepts, at times, forgive me, I will delve into the nuance of one representation of an identifier vs. another.

I look forward to this dialog with the library community. If you want to contact me you can do so through my i-name by clicking here: =andy.dale (More about i-names and contact pages soon :-) )

The Developer's Network will be hosting a luncheon on Sunday, Jan. 25 at ALA Midwinter.

This would be your chance to join fellow developers and tech enthusiasts for an informal luncheon...except we're already at capacity. Who knew there would be so many people attending a conference in Denver in January?

But never fear, we'll post a summary of the discussion and photos of the meeting right here, after the fact. There will be a presentation on all the new activities going on with OCLC Grid Services, and guest speakers will share what they've created:

• Holly Eggleston from UCSD will share the latest on EZproxy authentication with Shibboleth
• Larry Henry from ERIC will discuss ERIC's implementation of WorldCat and Find in a Library
• Karen Coombs from the University of Houston will go over the Wordpress plugin for WorldCat

We invite other participants to bring their apps or sample code to share with the group in this informal, open-discussion setting. New this conference is also a poster gallery of sample Grid Services mash-ups and applications that members of the Developer's Network have created.

We're excited to share these innovative uses of the OCLC developer tools available -- and look forward to brainstorming with you in 2009 about new ways to build on the world’s richest library resource.

If you're going to ALA, we'll see you in Denver. You may also want to sign-up and attend the OCLC Update Breakfast on Sunday, Jan. 25 from 7-9 a.m.

ISBN number is structured and contains four parts of information: Group or country identifier, Publisher identifier, Title identifier and check digits. Because ISBN are allocated by blocks to publishers, all ISBNs in same block should have same publisher information. So it's possible to guess ISBN's publisher information from its structure, however this will only work well when there is a big database of ISBN-prefix and corresponding publisher name.

Incidentally, there are over 19 million ISBNs in xISBN database, from this database, we can actually create a rather comprehensive ISBN-prefix database. Inspired by Publisher Name Server project in OCLC Research, in last data release we count 551,528 ISBN publisher-prefixes, and it is not very far away from ISBN agency's directory ( 880,000 prefixes) . From our ISBN prefix table, we add "guessing" service for xISBN, which tries to guess publisher information of any ISBN, even they are not covered by Worldcat, such as following:

http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/7806281622.js?method=hyphen

returns

{"stat":"ok",

 "list":[{

	"isbn":["7-80628-162-2"],

	"area":"China, People's Republic",

	"publisher":"San Qin chu ban she",

	"city":"Xi'an Shi"}]}