As many of you are aware, the xISBN service, developed by OCLC's
Office of Research, has been running in an experimental,
semi-supported mode, and it has proved quite popular. Last year, OCLC
charged the OCLC Openly Informatics Division with the task of making
it a fully supported WorldCat service.

At about 4PM EST on Tuesday, February 14, a switch will be flipped,
and traffic aimed at the experimental version of xISBN will begin to
be routed to a replacement xISBN service supported by the Openly
Informatics Division of OCLC. Any application that follows http
redirects- this should be most xISBN client applications- will
continue to work without needing changes. The timing of this switch
has been dictated by the decommissioning of a server, and we
apologize if this short notice seriously impacts anyone.

After the switch, the traffic currently sent to
"http://labs.oclc.org/xisbn/[ISBN]" will be redirected to
"http://old-xisbn.oclc.org/webservices/xisbn/[ISBN]". This service
will respond in almost exactly the same way that the research version
has responded; you can change your applications to use the
replacement address effective immediately. Of immediate benefit to
all users of xISBN is be the drastically improved currency and
frequent updates of the xISBN data set.

As you might guess from the replacement system host name, there will
soon be a "new" version of the xISBN service. Xiaoming Liu, who has
been working on xISBN for 3 months, will unveil the "WorldCat xISBN
Service" at the Code4Lib conference at the end of the month.

There is a small difference in the behavior of the replacement
service. If you send the replacement service a 13 digit ISBN, the
entire result set will be returned with 13 digits.

If you expect your xISBN client service to use more than 1000 queries
per day, please let us know ([log in to unmask]), as the traffic
control systems have also changed.

To make sure that you are alerted of all of the coming changes
surrounding xISBN,  please make sure to sign up for the XIDENTIFIER-L
listserv. Sign up at
http://listserv.oclc.org/scripts/wa.exe?A0=XIDENTIFIER-L


--

Eric Hellman, Director                            OCLC Openly
Informatics Division
[log in to unmask]                                    2 Broad St., Suite 208
tel 1-973-509-7800 fax 1-734-468-6216              Bloomfield, NJ 07003
http://openly.oclc.org/1cate/      1 Click Access To Everything