Classify, nifty new thing from OCLC
OCLC’s Lorcan Dempsey posted Class Numbers on Works on his blog; he describes Classify, a new thing that tells you what call numbers have been assigned to a book.
Big deal, you say. But wait! What if it told you the call numbers assigned to a work? Aha! Now we’re talking FRBR. One work can have lots of different expressions and manifestations, but if they’re all the same work then they should end up classified the same. The more manifestations you can look up in WorldCat, the more data you have at hand, and that’s always useful.
For example, my copy of Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th edition), known to librarians as the APA Style Guide, has ISBN 1557987912.
The Classify listing for the APA Style Guide uses xISBN to find all the other known manifestations of this work, and then looks up information about them all in WorldCat, and shows it to you nicely summarized and with pretty pictures.
Pretty much everyone classifies this book in with psychology at BF 76.7 (Library of Congress Classification), but to me it’s a style guide, so I put it at Z 253.P83 so it’s collocated with MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (“the MLA”), A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (“Turabian”) and The Chicago Manual of Style (“Chicago”). It’s my library and I can do what I want. Serving the needs of the user!