Ed Jones wrote:
> Smaller publishers are assigned longer publisher prefixes. For example,
> a publisher in an English-speaking country that expected to have a total
> output of ten or fewer publications might have a publisher prefix seven
> digits long (9500000-9999999), and a publication identifier consisting
> of a single digit. For the truly obsessive, the range message table is
> available at
> http://www.isbn-international.org/data/ranges/rangemessage-prefix.pdf.
>
Wikipedia has lists of publisher codes and publishers for the 0 and 1
lists, which is what OL started with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_group-0_ISBN_publisher_codes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_group-1_ISBN_publisher_codes
I don't know how they came up with these, or if we could "discover" the
other ranges from the bib data itself.
kc
> It's also important that these are registration numbers only. What we
> choose to call "publishers" are in fact registrants as far as the
> International ISBN Agency is concerned. A single "registrant" may
> represent several "publishers" in the cataloging sense. It is often the
> imprint that carries meaning to a particular user community, which may
> ascribe to that imprint a certain authority within a given discipline.
> The registrant, on the other hand may be a legal entity that owns
> dozens, if not hundreds of such imprints.
>
> Ed
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind
> Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 8:05 AM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] ISBNs as publisher identifiers
>
> 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 - 12:18:29 EDT