xOCLCNUM
Earlier this week OCLC announced xOCLCNUM, which is like xISBN except that instead of giving it an ISBN and getting back related ISBNs, you give it an OCLC number and get back related OCLC numbers.
Timothy McCormick included this in his e-mail to the code4lib mailing list about it: “ISBNs have been assigned since 1970, to most but not all books published. OCLC numbers are assigned whenever a record is added to WorldCat, OCLC’s global union catalog. These records cover a large portion of all books, old and new, held by any library in North America and, increasingly other regions worldwide (most recently, National Library of China: see http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/20085.htm). So the coverage range of OCLC numbers is, not surprisingly, far greater than that of ISBNs: in WorldCat, for example, around 100 million OCLCnums compared to about 20 million ISBNs.”
Very useful.
They claim that xOCLCNUM is part of xISBN — but why have two separate APIs? What if I have access to a resource’s ISBN, but want a list of OCLC numbers returned or vice-versa? What if I want to send one number and get back both for every work, or ISBNs by default for most works except those that are related but don’t have ISBNs?
Comment by Brad Czerniak — 24 May 2008 @ 11:20 amIt’s one API.
Comment by Eric — 4 June 2008 @ 10:50 pm