[WikiEN-l] JSTOR and free external links

[Andrew Gray]

On 19/09/2007, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at 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 at dunelm.org.uk