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