If someone links to a standard widely held edition, as people should, WorldCat (=OCLC, in this context) by itself is enough of a guide--I think people know generally that there are multiple editions of things and to look around. But I imagine the problem that you are considering is how to handle it when someone links to something weird. I am not sure it can be automatic altogether--If I link to the record for the original first folio, an I linking to it because I simply want to refer to an edition of the plays, or to the first folio in general, as available in reprint and facsimile, or because I actually want to make a record to the original printing of that edition?
On 9/20/07, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
On 19/09/2007, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
OCLC will link together different printings, and in many cases even editions.
...if you pay them for it. xISBN went to being a paid-for service sometime earlier this year; there's a "free allocation" for nonprofit orgs, but if we begin using it on any real scale we'll get locked out. Which is fair enough, OCLC never saw a revenue stream they didn't like to leap on, but less than helpful.
thingISBN is free - and I believe Tim Spalding intends to keep it that way - but the coverage is (currently) smaller, and less validated. It remains to be seen what else appears, but there's definitely some aggregator-aggregating to be done!
(...)
It is true that there are perfectly good and sensible reasons for ISBNs being a quasi-edition based system, but the point remains that *for our purposes* it's very much a mess. Nothing is less helpful than giving "the ISBN" for a book; it implies accuracy and completeness whilst providing only partial information. In most cases - in almost all cases - we want to refer to a work as a whole, not an edition-level manifestation of it. So how do we enable the Wikipedia/MediaWiki internal ISBN lookup system to do that?
The linking of different true editions is a little more complicated. Libraries do list them separately.. Library cataloging has various devices for bringing them together,
I am a cataloguer too, you know ;-)
and OCLC and other library catalogs generally do a fairly sophisticated job of this. Related works are also brought together; the details are again quite technical, but the bases are what we call a "uniform title" and the concept of a "work". The intention is to provide for any useful level of aggregation.
Work aggregation across editions is common and sophisticated? We have a hundred hacks for it, but I would hesitate to consider it good.
You'll see it in action if you look for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in any library catalog. And in a large library you'll see it for Great Expectations too, for there are translations into other languages.
There is no need for WP to figure this all out internally.
Yes, there is, to a large degree. If we want to make real use of this ISBN-lookup trickery as a way of getting our readers and editors to be able to find works, we need to find some way of doing the ISBN lookup and alternates on our end, rather than faintly hoping whatever catalogue we link out to can manage it.
Without that, [[special:booksources]] is really just a neat little toy. It could be so much more. We don't need to code a new xISBN; we do need to adopt that kind of functionality without becoming dependent on an external resource.
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.