OCLC moving xISBN, but nothing will break
[Warning: If you follow other technical and cataloguing library blogs, you probably already know about this. If you don't, start following Planet Code4Lib, where you'll see at least three other blogs posting this announcement.]
xISBN is the OCLC service that accepts an ISBN and returns a list of ISBNs that represent other manifestations of that same work. It’s simple and extremely useful.
They’re doing some work on it. Here’s an announcement Eric Hellman sent to the code4lib mailing list yesterday (except that I corrected 14 to 13):
As many of you are aware, the xISBN service, developed by OCLC’s Office of Research, has been running in an experimental, semi-supported mode, and it has proved quite popular. Last year, OCLC charged the OCLC Openly Informatics Division with the task of making it a fully supported WorldCat service.
At about 4PM EST on Tuesday, February 13, a switch will be flipped, and traffic aimed at the experimental version of xISBN will begin to be routed to a replacement xISBN service supported by the Openly Informatics Division of OCLC. Any application that follows http redirects- this should be most xISBN client applications- will continue to work without needing changes. The timing of this switch has been dictated by the decommissioning of a server, and we apologize if this short notice seriously impacts anyone.
After the switch, the traffic currently sent to
http://labs.oclc.org/xisbn/[ISBN]will be redirected tohttp://old-xisbn.oclc.org/webservices/xisbn/[ISBN]. This service will respond in almost exactly the same way that the research version has responded; you can change your applications to use the replacement address effective immediately. Of immediate benefit to all users of xISBN is be the drastically improved currency and frequent updates of the xISBN data set.As you might guess from the replacement system host name, there will soon be a “new” version of the xISBN service. Xiaoming Liu, who has been working on xISBN for 3 months, will unveil the “WorldCat xISBN Service” at the Code4Lib conference at the end of the month.
There is a small difference in the behavior of the replacement service. If you send the replacement service a 13 digit ISBN, the entire result set will be returned with 13 digits.
If you expect your xISBN client service to use more than 1000 queries per day, please let us know (xisbn-support@oclc.org), as the traffic control systems have also changed.
To make sure that you are alerted of all of the coming changes surrounding xISBN, please make sure to sign up for the XIDENTIFIER-L listserv. Sign up at http://listserv.oclc.org/scripts/wa.exe?A0=XIDENTIFIER-L.
Related blog posts: Thom Hickey, also of OCLC, comments, and Talis’s Panlibus blog chips in.