xISBN improvements
Xiaoming Liu sent some mail to the xISBN mailing list t’other day announcing some improvements.
Here’s a demo of xISBN. Just go there and press the button. (Excellent choice of manifestation and work, says I.) The “author” and “publisher” attributes in the results are new.
Liu included a link to these xISBN statistics: 14,940,275 ISBNs have been grouped into 11,840,205 work sets.
In 2001 in The Concept of a Work in WorldCat: An Application of FRBR (353 KB PDF), Bennett, Lavoie, and O’Neill (all of OCLC) said: “The average work in WorldCat has approximately 1.5 manifestations, indicating that for the most part, works in WorldCat are small, single-manifestation entities. More than 25 million of the 32 million works in WorldCat (78%) consist of a single manifestation. Ninety-nine percent (99%) of all works in WorldCat have seven manifestations or less, and only about 30,000, or 1% have more than 20 manifestations.”
Liu posted numbers showing what they know now about works and manifestations:
- Text showing how many records have a given number of manifestations
- Graphical respresentation of the above
This is only manifestations with ISBNs, and the earlier analysis looked at all manifestations in WorldCat. Liu said on the mailing list, “Our result shows that average work has 1.26 manifestations. More than 86% works consist of a single manifestation. And more than 99.5% of all works have seven manifestations or less.”