Sunday, December 09, 2007

xISBN everywhere

The FRBR blog posted on Eric Hellman's annoucement that wikipedia is now available as a lookup option in xISBN.

xISBN seems to be everywhere now. It's used by LibX. It's available to resolvers. It's obviously part of WorldCat. But through what tools can you take advantage of the option to choose which, or maybe multiple, lookup options you want?

I went to the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland wikipedia article. I wondered which icon would appear next to the ISBNs -- LibX or Find@UVA. It was the latter. For a paperback edition of Alice in Amazon, it's the former.

With LibX and Amazon I got a great application of xISBN against our catalog. With Find@UVA I got no matches because it's not using xISBN (note to self -- make sure that we request support for xISBN and the newly announced xISSN as features, if we haven't already). In both cases the lookup target was our catalog, because that's the default (or only option).

LibX can search other lookups -- WorldCat and GoogleScholar. Depending on the requests they get (Wikipedia has a bad rep as a search resource among many academic librarians and faculty), they could add Wikipedia.

But what if I want to check in more than one location for links or citations or holdings? Is there a tool that can do that?

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