For our purposes (federated search) it would be most useful to have as many of the available links (OL or other) as possible, and as much information about the link as possible. Obvious "structural" stuff like the type of identifier, but also the nature of the linked object (as you suggest "full text", "scan", etc.) This enables the links to be "categorized" in the user display so they can eliminate the ones not of interest, or focus on those that are.
Anything which differentiates the links from the perspective of the user is generally useful. In this regard some information about the editions at the ends of the links (even just a number and/or date) would be useful, and stop systems coming back to OL multiple times for all the linked records only to extract and display one or two bits of information. This has got to be the worst case for user response time, and almost certainly for load on the OL system. So if a certain amount of this information can be statically pre-coordinated with the links, or gathered by OL at request time, it has got to be more efficient.
For us the format of the records is of little importance as we convert them anyway.
Peter
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Karen Coyle
> Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2010 10:23
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [CODE4LIB] Works API
>
> Open Library now has Works defined, and is looking to develop an API
> for their retrieval. It makes obvious sense that when a Work is
> retrieved via the API, that the data output would include links to the
> Editions that link to that Work. Here are a few possible options:
>
> 1) Retrieve Work information (author, title, subjects, possibly
> reviews, descriptions, first lines) alone
> 2) Retrieve Work information + OL identifiers for all related Editions
> 3) Retrieve Work information + OL identifiers + any other identifiers
> related to the Edition (ISBN, OCLC#, LCCN)
> 4) Retrieve Work information and links to Editions with full text / scans
>
> Well, you can see where I'm going with this. What would be useful?
>
> kc
>
> --
> Karen Coyle
> [log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
> ph: 1-510-540-7596
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet
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