Yes, when a publisher runs out of a block of ISBNs they get another one.
That will show up in our stats because you'll see the same publisher
more than once. And, yes, ISBNs alone are not going to be unambiguous,
but they do help us gather together the various forms of the name that
has been used in actual bib data. I would bet that Bowker has some
system for identifying publishers -- at least as customers for ISBNs. In
the end, though, it's going to be like identifying any other corporate
body: there will need to be rules for establishing a publisher "record".
And of course there are all of the pre-ISBN publishers to deal with.
kc
Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> 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
>> ------------------------------------
>>
>>
>
>
--
-----------------------------------
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 - 11:23:43 EDT