The most reliable source is the Publishers' International ISBN
Directory, edited by the International ISBN Agency and published by Saur
(now an imprint of De Gruyter). It's available in both print and CD-ROM
versions.
http://www.degruyter.de/cont/imp/saur/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783598215940-3
5
From the blurb: "The current, 35th edition of this established reference
work offers a wealth of information on the worldwide publishing
landscape. It includes approximately 841,000 ISBN prefixes from 200
countries and territories. The Geographical Section (3 volumes) provides
the names of more than 737,000 active publishing houses, arranged
alphabetically by country, and within country by name. Entries contain
the full address including eMail and URL particulars as well as ISBN
prefixes. Publishers can be identified via their ISBN prefixes through
the Numerical ISBN Section (volume 4)."
Of course, De Gruyter would probably object to using this as a source
for populating a publisher identifier database, since the free
availability of such a database would presumably impact their sales.
Ed
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 9:16 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] ISBNs as publisher identifiers
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 - 12:41:21 EDT