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WorldCat xISBN : At a glance

WorldCat xISBN at a glance

The WorldCat xISBN service is a machine-to-machine service that supplies ISBNs and other information associated with an individual work in WorldCat—the world's richest database for discovery of items held in libraries. Submit an ISBN to the service and it returns a list of related ISBNs and selected metadata.

Benefits

WorldCat xISBN is ideal for Web-enabled search applications, such as library catalogs and online booksellers. Based on associations made in the WorldCat database, WorldCat xISBN enables an end user to link to information about other versions of a source book.

WorldCat xISBN enables Web users to:

  • Identify a book from an online bookseller to determine if the book is available at the user’s library.
  • Confirm that no alternative versions of a work are available before a library sends an interlibrary loan request.
  • Use a single search to check holdings of all editions of a work before making a selection for acquisition.
  • Receive associated ISBNs in either XML or XHTML formats.

Features

  • Users of the xISBN service  submit a single, known ISBN value embedded in a URL to the xISBN server. The server will then return a list of associated ISBNs and relevant metadata.
  • The ISBNs are sorted by the number of times—from highest to lowest—each represented item is held by a WorldCat library. The first returned ISBN represents the most-held item in WorldCat among all associated items.
  • The ISBNs returned from the service can in turn be used in an "or" query to a bibliographic database to improve the chances of an end user finding all instances of the work in a given database. For example, a user finding an item of interest at an online bookseller could conveniently query a local library's online catalog to find out if any editions or printings of the item are held at the library.