WorldCat Registry Detail Service - Look up by OCLC symbol
Written by colleague Joanna White, Product Manager of the WorldCat Registry.
Users can use a new Registry Web Service to retrieve an institution record in XML using the OCLC symbol.
For example:
http://worldcat.org/webservices/registry/lookup/Institutions/oclcSymbol/OCL?serviceLabel=content
Additional notes.
Q: What happens when no records are found?
When no WorldCat Registry record is found for a given OCLC Symbol , the web service returns "0" results in the XML response while the user interface presents options to adjust the search query.
Q: Do I need to adjust my service for searches by special characters?
Yes. Services that utilize these web services have to accommodate for special characters present in some OCLC symbols, for example symbols such as "A#2".
Q: What is included in the returned content?
If a user is not authorized, then the "public view" of the XML data is returned to the user. If the user is authorized, then the "authorized" version of the XML data is returned to the user. For example, "authorized" users will see IP Addresses for the record. More information on all the data fields is available with Data Fields Quick Reference at http://www.oclc.org/us/en/registry/support/Registryquickreference.pdf
WorldCat Registry detailed search is also available as part of our more general Registry Search web service. This SRU service returns HTML to a web browser but XML to software agents (e.g., curl)
Example of SRU search:
http://www.worldcat.org/webservices/registry/search/Institutions?version=1.1&operation=searchRetrieve&recordSchema=info%3Arfa%2FrfaRegistry%2FschemaInfos%2FadminData&maximumRecords=10&startRecord=1&resultSetTTL=300&recordPacking=xml&query=local.oclcSymbol+exact+%22OCL%22+not+local.logicalDelete%3D%221%22&x-info-6-deletedRecord=
Details about the three WorldCat Registry web services are listed here http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/content/affiliate/default.jsp
2 Comments
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When it finds no registry record it returns 0 in the XML response, but it is a completely differentt sort of response probably coming directly from the SRU interface. This is not really a problem though.
What I would really want from this service is some extra functionality concerning Openurl base url's.
I would really like it to respond to a search on IP number and give back the institution that has a openurl resolver covering the domain of the IP adress, so I can provide a correct base url to people who are accessing our catalog from other areas. I can now see the baseurl in the response since I have discovererd I can do: http://worldcat.org/webservices/registry/lookup/Institutions/oclcSymbol/OCL?serviceLabel=enhancedContent
Now I would like it to retrieve the record by IP adress. That would be great.
Hi Peter, you might want to review our OpenURL resolver only look ups instead.
The OpenURL resolver look ups will provide information about the registered OpenURLs resolvers based on the IP address, including the WorldCat Registry ID ("InstitutionID") when available.
I find that these resolver only look ups by IP address are also useful for de-bugging. OCLC OpenURL Gateway presents resolvers based incoming IP address. We are often notified about issues when the Gateway presents more than one or missing resolvers, so these types of look ups help to see what users of Gateway see.
Here are two available look ups for OpenURL resolvers only:
IP: http://www.worldcat.org/registry/lookup?IP=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
OpenURL(s) resolvers registered for given IP address
requestor: http://www.worldcat.org/registry/lookup?IP=requestor
OpenURLs resolvers registered for incoming IP of the request
The output of the looks ups confirms to the resolver schema with the exception of listing OTHER associated IP addresses. The additional IP ranges for a given resolver might be registered but the output will not list them. That was done as a precaution to prevent unauthorized display of IP ranges of libraries freely on the web.