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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
Submitted by hamparid on Fri, 02/06/2009 - 7:28pm
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Which Andy is that? Are you sure?

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 :-) )
Submitted by admin on Thu, 01/29/2009 - 5:29pm
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Developer's Network at ALA Midwinter

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.

Submitted by rtennant on Fri, 01/16/2009 - 2:50pm
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guessing publisher from ISBN prefix

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"}]}
It will be interesting to see how this information can be used. On the other side, the "guessing" service is still approximate, we don't know all ISBN prefixes, and sometimes one ISBN prefix doesn't neatly identify one publisher, so use with caution.
Submitted by lxming on Mon, 01/12/2009 - 11:15am
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WorldCat Registry Links Now Easier to Create

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
Submitted by hamparid on Fri, 12/12/2008 - 5:10pm
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support hathitrust.org in xoclcnum service

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.
Submitted by lxming on Wed, 12/10/2008 - 2:55pm
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Better hyphen support in xISBN service

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.
Submitted by lxming on Wed, 12/10/2008 - 2:40pm
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Hackathon

I want to thank all of you who came to the first OCLC Developer's Network Hackathon at NYPL's Science, Industry and Business Library. We had good discussions about SRU, OCLC services like xID, Identities, and WorldCat Search API, and how all these services can play in Drupal, VuFind and other open source systems. See this video of the Hackathon. Also, some attenders put some pictures and info on the web including Eric Lease Morgan's summary, and our own site. And.. I want to thank Ann and Josh from NYPL for hosting - great facilities and you can't beat the location in NYC. Bruce Washburn and I had a nice long walkabout Saturday night up to Central Park and back down Park Avenue. Bruce took some pictures of his NYC trip. And I took a trip with a group of Hackathon'rs to the Empire State building on a beautiful misty night. Josh gave Alice and I a tour of the 42nd St NYPL HSSL - containing the main reading room, one of the great public spaces in the country. So my summary of our two days together -- fun, great code fragments and sample apps, great food, and opportunities to connect with library developers across North America (and two from Europe). We are planning the next Hackathon - maybe in Europe? Don
Submitted by hamparid on Sat, 11/15/2008 - 9:23pm
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LCCN support and other improvements in xID service

We added a few more features in this month's xID deployment, hopefully it could be useful in upcoming WorldCat Hackathon . For more information, please check xISBN API, xISSN API, and xOCLCNUM API. Thanks Andrew Nagy and Jonathan Rochkind for valuable suggestions.
Submitted by lxming on Thu, 11/06/2008 - 11:02am
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Building the Grid

From the beginning, the promise of web services generally -- and OCLC Grid Services specifically -- has been that as more services are deployed, the more options there will be to weave them together in interesting, effective, and imaginative ways. Here at OCLC we're already beginning to benefit from that in our own services. For example, we've long known that a key piece of infrastructure for many of our web services would be a registry of all kinds of information related to institutions -- their catalog web address, the address of their OpenURL resolver, plus a pile of other things that would be needed by a variety of services we hoped to build down the road. We implemented this a while back as the WorldCat Registry. Now, with the release of the WorldCat Search API, we are starting to see how various Grid Services can be knitted together to enrich the whole. When the WorldCat Search API returns search results, depending on the response type requested, it can be sending back information pulled from the WorldCat Registry -- such as the link to a library's catalog. Therefore, keeping your institution's information accurate and up-to-date in the WorldCat Registry will populate that information out into a growing set of services in a pain-free, effective, and efficient way. Now isn't that what this should all be about?
Submitted by rtennant on Tue, 09/30/2008 - 1:35pm
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