xOCLCNum News Archive

Based on feedback from OCLC Developer Network members, OCLC is pleased to announce that basic limits on all xIdentifier Web services have been increased to 1,000 queries per day. This increase is intended to facilitate easier use of the JSON-P format now in place, and is effective immediately. OCLC member libraries who also maintain an OCLC cataloguing subscription still remain eligible for higher usage limits at no charge. All other libraries and/or commercial organizations can select the subscription option that best meets their needs.

xOCLCNUM has a less-used, but I think very useful feature of limiting search scope to a collection, we call it search in library feature. The goal is to limit FRBR expansion to a smaller scope, such as a library or special collection. Thanks for wonderful help from Jeremy York, we recently added hathitrust.org as a collection. This feature is implemented in following way: a request can put an additional parameter "library=hathi" in xOCLCNUM request, the service will only return records which marked as free access in hathitrust.org, when I gather hathitrust data last time, we collected 189,723 free access records with OCLCNUM. Similarly, we have 129,239 free access records from Open Content Alliance, and overall there are 322,629 records about ebooks (mostly free content) in xOCLCNUM service. Besides that, because of the FRBR expansion of xOCLCNUM, when a user requests an OCLCNUM, the service can lookup other OCLCNUM with free access content in same work group, for example, OCLCNUM: 51848364 is a book in copyright, by using the search in a library request, we can tell there are multiple versions of free ebooks about this book, including copies in archive.org and hathitrust.org. I just did a quick calculation, by using the FRBR expansion, 2,446,005 OCLCNUMs can link to a version of ebook. it is still a small percentage of the worldcat database, but I suspect it might be large enough for real world usage, so it would be nice to see this feature get better usage. We have a similar feature in xISBN service, but because most free access books don't have ISBNs, the xOCLCNUM's version might be better for real world usage.

Thanks for great suggestion by Tod Matola in OCLC, we are introducing an OCLCNUM normalization service as part of xOCLCNUM. -- xOCLCNUM service now accepts different variants of an OCLCNUM, and always return OCLCNUM in same flavor, such as: http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/oclcnum/ocm55847258?method=getEditions&format=xml&fl=lccn,isbn --add a new method to generate different variants of an OCLCNUM. http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/oclcnum/55847258?method=getVariants&format=xml For more information, please check http://xisbn.worldcat.org/xisbnadmin/xoclcnum/api.htm#getvariants