Links to WorldCat Identities

Update: here is a more recent posting about this.

I promised in a recent comment to talk more about how the links work to WorldCat Identities.  As I said before, the mechanism that WorldCat.org uses is an OpenURL, but complicated by the desire to put the new page within a frame.  Here is the equivalent URL without the frame:
http://worldcat.org/identities/find ?url_ver=Z39.88-2004 &rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:identity &rft.namelast=Austen &rft.namefirst=Jane &rft.id=info:oclcnum/908814 , slightly edited by adding some spaces so that the lines can break.

If you leave off the OCLC number, the system is no longer sure exactly which Jane Austen you are interested in and will give you a list to choose from.  Here is the same example without the OCLC number: http://worldcat.org/identities/find ?url_ver=Z39.88-2004 &rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:identity &rft.namelast=Austen &rft.namefirst=Jane, which should return something like this:

What is returned is really XML with a reference to an XSL stylesheet to transform the XML into the HTML displayed by the browser.  The page has a brief explanation of the symbols and results formatting:

More than one person has suggested that the need for a key to the results indicates a problem.  Although I think it useful (especially for the library-literate) to contrast between controlled and uncontrolled names, I'm less comfortable with the traditional personal/corporate split.  In retrospect it would have been better to ignore the MARC coding on the names and merge the occasional Jane Austen that is coded as a corporate name in with the rest of those coded as a personal name.

Actually there is a much simpler URL which works too: http://worldcat.org/identities/find?fullName=jane+austen.  This is the probably the format we will encourage people to use in external linking.

Although WorldCat Identities uses LCCNs when available there is no reason we can't add indexes to OCLC's Authority Record Numbers (ARNs).  There is essentially a 1 to 1 correspondence between ARNs and LCCNs for names and it is ARNs that are carried along with controlled and linked headings in WorldCat.

Thanks to Ralph LeVan who designed, implemented and explained most of this.

--Th

Comments

[Conal]

For myself, I think I'd probably want to store these authority identifiers as info:lccn or info:oclcnum URIs, and generate OpenURLs from them only as required.

Is an OCLC Authority Record Number the same thing as an "oclcnum" as defined for "info" URIs?

Response: The Authority Record Number is separate from the info oclcnum. We should probably establish an info URI pattern for it. --Th

[Peter Murray]

Nicely done! Thanks for the extended explanation. Your earlier comment makes sense now.

[Peter Murray]

A follow up observation, Thom --

I noticed that if I start at the browse page for Jane Austin (http://worldcat.org/identities/find?fullName=jane+austen) that the links to the records are much shorter (a link based on LCCN -- http://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n79-32879 -- in the case of records with authority control and a text-oriented one -- http://worldcat.org/identities/nc-jane%20austen$1775%201817 -- in the case of records without authority control). I think it would be true that these shorter URLs would more likely be the Subject or Object of semantic web assertions...more so than the longer, OpenURL-based URIs. Does OCLC have a position on how Worldcat services (both Identities and the bibliographic database) could and should be used in semantic web assertions?

Response: I'm not aware of a position, and it probably depends on what you are doing. We do think of the URI with the LCCN as the canonical URI for the resource (and that is what we use internally to link the pages). It gets complicated, though, with things like WorldCat local which has its own URL pattern. I'll expand on this in another post. --Th