Hi,

thanks to everybody who's replied with offers to provide ISBNs.

I need to clarify that I'm looking for a sample of ISBNs that is
representative of some larger population, such as "all books cataloged
by LoC", or "all books in library X's catalog", or "all books sold by
Amazon."

It could be, for instance, a simple random sample [1].

What will not work are ISBNs coming from a FRBR service, from a
specialized collections, or the "first n ISBNs" coming from a catalog
dump (unless that order in which the catalog database is dumped is
explicitly random).

 - Godmar

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_random_sample

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 10:40 AM, Shanley-Roberts, Ross A. Mr.
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I could give you any number of sets of isbns. What kind of material are you interested in: videos, books, poetry, electronic resources, etc., or I could supply a set of isbns for any subject area or LC classification area that you might be interested in.
>
>  Ross
>
>
>  Ross Shanley-Roberts
>  Special Projects Technologist
>  Miami University Libraries
>  Oxford, OH 45056
>  [log in to unmask]
>  847 672-9609
>  847 894-3911 cell
>
>
>
>
>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Godmar Back
>  Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 8:35 AM
>  To: [log in to unmask]
>  Subject: [CODE4LIB] how to obtain a sampling of ISBNs
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
>  for an investigation/study, I'm looking to obtain a representative
>  sample set (say a few hundreds) of ISBNs. For instance, the sample
>  could represent LoC's holdings (or some other acceptable/meaningful
>  population in the library world).
>
>  Does anybody have any pointers/ideas on how I might go about this?
>
>  Thanks!
>
>   - Godmar
>