A weblog following developments around the world in FRBR: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.

Maintained by William Denton, Web Librarian at York University. Suggestions and comments welcome at wtd@pobox.com.


Confused? Try What Is FRBR? (2.8 MB PDF) by Barbara Tillett, or Jenn Riley's introduction. For more, see the basic reading list.

Books: FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed by Robert Maxwell (ISBN 9780838909508) and Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools edited by Arlene Taylor (ISBN 9781591585091) (read my chapter FRBR and the History of Cataloging).

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xISBN v2 pricing discussions

Posted by: William Denton, 10 May 2007 7:12 am
Categories: OCLC

In case you didn’t see the comments on yesterday’s post (which you should), or read some discussion of this elsewhere, I thought I’d point out the new xISBN pricing sheet. The main page about xiSBN says, “The xISBN Web service is free for non-commercial use when usage does not exceed 500 requests per day…. The service is also available on a subscription basis for non-commercial and commercial use for usage that meets or exceeds 500 requests per day.”

There was some discussion on the code4lib mailing list following Eric Hellman’s announcement.

In What’s a Web Service Worth, Richard Wallis of Talis said, “OCLC are dipping their toe in the water on behalf of many of us who will be watching this service closely.”

I wish I knew more about how OCLC made the decisions it did. How did they decide on their pricing? What have they seen in the xISBN v1 usage logs? Who do they expect will pay? Who’s already paying?

You might not expect a change in the license on an obscure FRBR-related algorithm to generate this much discussion, but there’s more here than just ISBNs. OCLC, an enormous American non-profit organization made up of member libraries, had a free service that now they’re charging for. Talis, a UK for-profit company with a large union catalogue of its own but no xISBN-equivalent service, is watching to see how this evolves.

LibraryThing, a small American for-profit company that charges very little for its services, has thingISBN, which is free. Tim Spalding, who runs it, said on the code4lib list, “I’d love to see LT’s member-driven data mashed up with more traditional work-set analysis. At this point everyone is free to try that on their own, but we’ll move to a more traditional copyleft license, so improvements like that have to be shared.”

Behind some of the discussion about all this is the feeling, which I share, that all bibliographic metadata should be free. If it were, it would be simple to build a free xISBN replacement. Of course, it isn’t. But some of it is. Perhaps enough. My Pride and Prejudice experiment is one start along that path, and I’ll get back to it tomorrow and give you something to do over the weekend.