For what it's worth, I see over 7,000 links to IMDB from WorldCat records.
Roy

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 9:01 AM, marijane white
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
>>>>
>>>
>