Yes, you can see that happening in some of the ones on the list. And
this brings up the whole question of "What's a publisher?" -- at least
in terms of our purposes. So we won't be able to use the ISBN prefix
alone to identify publishers, and we'll have to answer our 'what is a
publisher?' question in order to gather together and break apart ones
that get grouped by ISBN. If we were to create an "authority file" for
publishers, would it be for the company, or for the imprint? These are
hard questions, and we should consider them not in a theoretical way but
in terms of what we want to do with the information. For example, in
Europe the publisher is often considered an authority on a type of
literature, and people seek out books by publisher. (I've been in
bookstores that are arranged by publisher, not by topic.) So you would
want publisher to be searchable (and reliable as a search). There could
be reasons to link to the address of the publisher, or to find a
distributor for that publisher. etc.
kc
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 - 11:20:20 EDT