Are there other cases too where a very small publisher buying ISBNs in
just a block of 10 or 100 or something, won't actually get a unique
publisher prefix? I'm not an expert. But I suspect that ISBN prefixes
can indeed only be used as heuristic hints, not as clear unambiguous
publisher identifiers. Like, well, just about everything else we have in
our bib records, sadly. It's seldom unambiguous declarations we have to
work with.
Ed Jones wrote:
> Bear in mind that when one publisher acquires another, the acquiring
> publisher can continue to use the ISBNs of the acquired publisher. So
> the ISBN prefix of Publisher A may appear on publications bearing the
> imprint of Publisher B. Cf. ISBN User's Manual. 5th ed. (Berlin:
> International ISBN Agency, 2005), 5.10.
> http://www.isbn-international.org/en/download/2005%20ISBN%20Users%27%20M
> anual%20International%20Edition.pdf
>
> Ed Jones
> National University (San Diego, Calif.)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle
> Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 6:17 AM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: [NGC4LIB] ISBNs as publisher identifiers
>
> You probably know that there is a part of the ISBN that identifies the
> publisher. Edward Betts of the Open Library did a run through the OL
> database and matched up the variant forms of publisher names based on
> the ISBN in the record. His blog post
> http://blog.openlibrary.org/2009/07/20/isbn-publisher-codes/
> links to the full file for downloading with counts for each publisher.
>
> In the file http://home.us.archive.org/~edward/isbn/index.html, if you
> click on an individual publisher, you see all the various publisher
> names and the dates in which they are used (which sometimes doesn't mean
>
> anything, but at other times shows publisher name changes), something
> like:
>
> 0-06: 41084: (1073-1997) Harper & Row
> 15191: (1953-2010) HarperCollins
> 6351: ( 1-2009) HarperCollins Publishers
> 5122: (1921-2007) HarperSanFrancisco
> 3550: (1933-2009) HarperPerennial
> 2704: (1970-2009) HarperCollinsPublishers
> 2121: (1947-1988) Barnes & Noble Books
> 1908: (1993-2009) William Morrow
> 1642: (1900-2004) Perennial Library
> 1599: (1952-1988) Barnes & Noble
>
> It seems to me that this would be a good start for 1) creating an
> identifier for publishers (http://blahblah/0-06), and 2) a beginning of
> an authority record with all forms of the name.
>
> Yes, there are errors (as you can see above), so there would need to be
> some cleanup, but I'm excited to be able to even think about having a
> publisher "entity" and not just a string in our data.
>
> kc
>
> --
> -----------------------------------
> Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
> ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
> fx.: 510-848-3913
> mo.: 510-435-8234
> ------------------------------------
>
>
Received on Tue Jul 21 2009 - 11:07:20 EDT