Posted on behalf of my OCLC Research colleagues. - Karen Smith-Yoshimura
OCLC Research has been working for some years on an authority file of
publisher names, much as Karen Coyle called for in an earlier post. The
OCLC Publisher Name Authority File is a stand-alone database containing
more than 1800 of the larger publishing entities worldwide (companies,
divisions, imprints), matched to bibliographic records with almost 500
million holdings in WorldCat. The information contained in our
experimental authority file includes authorized forms of publisher names
(from the LC National Authority File in around 45% of the cases),
geographical information, thousands of variant names, former names, and
variant strings from 260$b fields, and all relationships among the
publishers (imprints, subsidiaries, acquisitions and mergers, etc.). We
began our project considering ISBN prefixes, but due to the numerous
difficulties in using them as publisher identifiers (many of the
difficulties have been noted in this thread), we have only used them as
one part of the methodology for grouping records by publisher.
Please see http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/publisherns/default.htm
for more information, and copies of presentations relating to this
project.
Sincerely,
Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist
Timothy J. Dickey, Ph.D., Post-Doctoral Researcher
OCLC Research
Received on Wed Jul 22 2009 - 17:11:08 EDT