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 improvements: JSON callbacks

Posted by: William Denton, 22 April 2008 7:16 am
Categories: OCLC

Xiaoming Liu posted xISBN JSON Callback and a GoogleBooks Demo last week.

JSON output is native JavaScript, and callbacks are particularly useful for use with web service requests in client-side JavaScript. see: http://xisbn.worldcat.org/xisbnadmin/doc/api.htm#callback.

I don’t see the Google Books magic in the Google Books demo that he mentions, but that’s probably some temporary thing or something on Google’s end. I noticed that happen when I did some Google Books availability testing of my own. Give it a try and see if it works.

You can also get the xISBN output in tab-delimited format, perfect for shell hacking. Liu gives an example which I tweak slightly:

$ GET "http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/0596002815?method=getEditions&fl=*&format=txt" | cut -f 2,5
177669176 54619668 55847258 79871142	Learning Python
44960325	Learning Python
41466161	Learning Python
156890981 182576260 190774334 213482782	Learning Python.
44124125	Introduction à Python
173084464	Learning python.
69532105	Python

(GET is from Perl’s libwww-perl module, and I always use it and fetch in preference to curl.)