thingISBN is getting better – so does SeeAlso

17. Januar 2008 um 00:05 Keine Kommentare

Tim Spalding points out that thingISBN is getting better [via FRBR blog] – a good reason to update the thingISBN data of our SeeAlso Linkserver isbn2librarything. It now includes 2994299 ISBNs, that’s almost 12 times the size of the isbn2wikipedia linkserver. But what’s a linkserver? A linkserver is a server that gets an identifier (for instance an ISBN) and gives you links (for instance a link to a work at LibraryThing). You can try out some SeeAlso linkservers at a demo page or start to implement your own.

To get an impression, look in GBV union catalog, for instance this record: after a short moment, a link to German Wikipedia is included. More and more German libraries follow to include such additional links in their catalog. The Catalog of University Bremen includes both links to (German) Wikipedia and links to LibraryThing (you have to click at „weitere Informationen…“ at a selected record):

There is also an experimental ISBN2WorldCat linkserver. But linkservers that only send one or zero links are not very effective. I could combine multiple service to something like ISBN2SocialCataloging or such. Any suggestions for other services that libraries might not be frightened to link to? I’d also like to include more data in the link to LibraryThing (for instance the number of reviews) but unless German libraries wake up to ask for LibraryThing for Libraries I better not reimplement services that LibraryThing already offers.

The linkserver model could also be used to provide links to library holding and thus implement a FRBR-Manifestation to FRBR-Item mapping. As I just wrote at CODE4LIB and PER4LIB, a simple data format for holding information is needed to do so.

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