xISBN News Archive

On Sunday, February 27 there will be a scheduled service downtime for a number of OCLC services from 1:00 am until at least 6:00 am and, at most, 11:00 am (U.S. Eastern Time). We apologize for any inconvenience this causes. We need to take the following services off-line in order to upgrade the storage systems and capacity for all OCLC services. During this time, the following services will be unavailable:

Another question that was asked at the OCLC Web Services Bootcamp at VALA was "Can I find the earliest edition with xID?" The answer is Yes The getEditions response from xISBN has fields for both edition and year published information. Edition information is sometimes missing so the best way to handle finding the earliest edition is to use the year field. There are a couple different ways one might do this. One could use an XSL to sort the nodes ascending by year and then pull out the ISBN or OCLC Number of the first one.

We added a few new features to xID service: - xISSN now supports ISSN-L and RSSURL field, such as http://xissn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/issn/1095-9203?method=getMetadata&fl=issnl,rssurl ISSN-L data is obtained from ISSN agency, and rssurl is obtained from ticTOCS. xISSN also adds values to both data set, for example, xISSN automatically adds RSSURL to all ISSNs in same group. - xOCLCNUM now supports OCLC workid, such as: http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/oclcnum/55847258?fl=owi And you can query by workid as well: http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/owi/owi718389 I highly recommend using "owi[0-9]" in its whole format when you came upon workid, this will be very helpful for identifying workid from any web pages and facilitates interoperability and mashup. For more information, please check xISSN and xOCLCNUM API.

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.