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Kyle Banerjee wrote: > > I like the idea, but in the long term, I just don't know how useful > this will be. By and large, these identifiers are designed for dead > tree resources. Only time will tell, but it's what we've got now, and I don't see our existing legacy records going away. So we will continue to need to try and match existing records to digitized resources representing those existing records. (Keep in mind that OCA for now is mostly only digitizing out of copyright stuff!) The more identifiers the more likely we can succesfully make such a match. > One thing to keep in mind is that although the numbering schemes are > independent, they can be thought of as hierarchical. Anything that has > an lccn number should already have an isbn because of the standards lc > catalogs to. Nope. ISBN was created in 1966. LCCNs exist for many resources published before 1966. Even after 1966, not every single item that may have been cataloged by the Library of Congress was neccesarily assigned an ISBN by it's publisher. (One obvious overlooked example---non-print resources, like music or videos! LC doesn't catalog very many of these, but any they have aren't going to have ISBNs! Other examples---foreign publishers, self-published stuff, the first few years after 66 when ISBN adoption curve was still on the way up, etc. ) > And they put their holdings in OCLC, so all numbers that > have an oclc number should contain these other identifiers. Nope. I think you mean all items that have an LCCN should also have an OCLC number. Probably true (mostly). But all items that have an OCLC number will not neccesarily have an LCCN. You say so below "items that were not cataloged by lc" will have oclc numbers but probably not lccns. And once we get away from LC, the chances of a cataloged item (with an OCLC number) not having an ISBN go up even more (any musical CD, for instance, not usually held by LC but held by public libraries accross the US). > Items with > oclc numbers that were not cataloged by lc should also have isbns. > When such conditions are not met, it is a sign of a record containing > unreliable information. > I do not believe this is the case. But let us admit that our cooperative cataloging corpus in fact IS not very reliable, it is full of incorrect information. But we've got to deal with it anyway. A record that is _missing_ an applicable identifier that it _could_ have contained may be reliable in other respects, I wouldn't automatically assume it is not. Jonathan > kyle > -- > ---------------------------------------------------------- > Kyle Banerjee > Digital Services Program Manager > Orbis Cascade Alliance > [log in to unmask] / 541.359.9599 > > -- Jonathan Rochkind Digital Services Software Engineer The Sheridan Libraries Johns Hopkins University 410.516.8886 rochkind (at) jhu.edu