To confirm some of what Jonathan said...

As the maintainer of a collection nearing 20,000 DVDs, I can confirm that
DVDs rarely have ISBNs.  When they do, it's usually educational,
instructional, or musical content.  I don't think I've seen a feature film
DVD with an ISBN.

IMDB does have UPC data for some DVDs.  IIRC, searching for a UPC on IMDB
takes you to a page listing the DVDs for a particular movie, rather than the
main title page.

The only DVDs I've seen that did not have a UPC were pre-release screeners,
which I would be surprised to find in most library collections.


On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 8:26 AM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> But you're just going to have to title search on freebase, right? (Same
> functionality may be avail on IMBD directly without going through freebase,
> but more importantly...)
>
> There are frequently movies sharing the same title with an entirely
> different movie. Maybe title/year search instead?
>
> But movies wind up with several 'publication dates' (date of release in
> theaters, date of release for a DVD or videotape, different dates of release
> for different manifestations. Who knows what date you've got in your
> 'source' record you're trying to link to, and if that's going to match the
> date(s) in the freebase record.
>
> I'm not sure of a great way to do this. Metadata matching is a bitch.
>
> A FEW of our library bibliographic records actually have a UPC/EAN in them
> for videos. (ISBN is actually a subset of UPC/EAN, at least since ISBN-13.
> But I think DVDs and videocassettes sold aren't going to have an ISBN
> usually, but usually will have a UPC/EAN).
>
> If you've got one of those, you might be able to search on that in
> freebase? (even if you can't in IMBD directly? here's where freebase might
> rule).  Relies on freebase having that UPC/EAN in it's database, for the
> particular manifestation you've got a record for.   Not sure the prospects
> of that. And few (but some) of our records have UPC/EAN anyway.
>
> In general here though, this is another reminder that in the present
> environment, unambiguous identifiers RULE.  Like ISBN, UPC/EAN, etc.  One of
> the most valuable things catalogers can add to records. I really wish it
> would become common practice to add a UPC/EAN to all dvd/video records where
> the item-in-hand has one on it. Even if that means sacrificing some other
> things, I know cataloger time is a precious resource. But UPC/EAN should be
> considered very very high value, it could enable all sorts of value-added
> services and linking to external databases.
>
> Jonathan
>
>
> On 4/27/2011 11:09 AM, Sean Hannan wrote:
>
>> If I were doing this, I'd use the Freebase (freebase.com) API and write a
>> little app that returns the IMDB title stem (ex: tt0460791) for each of
>> the
>> films you're trying to match up.
>>
>> -Sean
>>
>>
>> On 4/27/11 10:56 AM, "R. Levi"<[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
>>
>>  I would like to add a link to IMDB for the feature  films that we have in
>>> our
>>> catalog.  IMDB doesn't appear to have  ISBNs.  Is there a way to link the
>>> MARC
>>> record with the IMDB record  without manually searching IMDB to find each
>>> movie?  Thanks, Rich
>>>
>>