WorldCat.org and Identities

Over the weekend WorldCat Identities went into production.  Personal authors now have a link to their WorldCat Identity page under the Details tab. The links are not hard links, but actually OpenURLs.  Here is the Jane Austen link from an Emma manifestation (OCLC #908814), with URL escaping edited out for readability:

http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/oclc/908814 ?page=frame &url=/identities/find ?url_ver=Z39.88-2004 &rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:identity &rft.namelast=Austen &rft.namefirst=Jane, &rft.nameinit=J &rft.nameinit1=J &rft.nameinitm= &rft.namesuffix= &rft.nametitle= &rft.date=1775-1817. &rft.name= &rft.birthdate=1775 &rft.deathdate=1817. &rft.arn= &rft.title=Emma. &rft_id=info:oclcnum/908814 &title= &linktype=identitiesLink .

The whole thing gets a bit messy because the Identity page gets embedded in a frame, the same way we frame pages from OPACs.

The pages themselves use LCCNs for their identifier if we have one, so they have nice simple cool URLs, which the frame obscures.  Here is Jane Austen's: http://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n79-32879.  We're still working on a few of these names, so the URLs aren't totally frozen, but they are getting close.

We have plans to document the various links into WorldCat Identities, but it's not too hard to see how the links work since everything is OpenURLs, SRU, XML, and stylesheets.

The research version of Identities is still there at http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/.   A close look will reveal some differences in how links work on the pages (more of those in the production version link directly back into WorldCat.org), and the research version makes it easier to search Identities directly rather than through WorldCat.org.  Unless this causes too much confusion we are planning on keeping it up so we can experiment publicly without impact on the production version.

--Th

Comments

[Peter Murray]

Congratulations, Thom -- to you and everyone at OCLC that made this possible. Nicely done. One question: I couldn't quite figure out what you meant by "The links are not hard links, but actually OpenURLs." Does 'hard' mean 'persistent' or something else?

[ThomasBHickey]

Thanks. Yes, getting this sort of thing up involves quite a bit of work from a number of people.

Maybe what I should have said was that the links are not 'direct'. They go to an OpenURL resolver that looks at the context object passed as key-value pairs and tries to determine the correct Identities page to return. In some cases it can't tell and will send you to a disambiguation page.

I'll do another post that discusses this in more detail.

--Th

[Jonathan Rochkind]

Nice. "fmt:kev:mtx:identity" ? Is that (and the subsequent rft.* values which are new to me) actually part of any OpenURL standard, or did you guys just make that up?

[ThomasBHickey]

I knew someone would ask that. We just made it up, but do intend to make things official at some point.

--Th