ThingISBN, our popular ISBN-based API, supports and returns data for two more identifiers: LCCN and OCLC.
At core, ThingISBN—blogged before here and here—takes an ISBN and returns a simple XML list of other ISBNs, corresponding to other “editions” of the work, eg.
Now, if you add &allids=1 to the ISBN, the XML will include relevant LCCN and OCLC numbers, eg.
http://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/0590353403&allids=1
You can also feed ThingISBN both numbers, eg.,
http://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/lccn97039059
http://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/ocm37975719
If you feed it an LCCN or an OCLC number you don’t need to add “&allids=1” to get back these identifiers.
What’s next?
- I haven’t added LCCNs and OCLC numbers to the ThingISBN feed, yet.
- Although there are some details to be worked out, this advance looks forward to adding support for LCCNs and OCLC numbers to LibraryThing for Libraries.
Tell us what’s going on. I know that ThingISBN gets a lot of use, some of it even in accordance with its Terms of Use. If you’re using ThingISBN, I’d love to hear how on a new wiki page I’ve created, Projects Currently Using ThingISBN.
Caveat. ThingISBN is free for non-commercial use. Commercial use requires our say-so. Read more here.
In the news! Coincidentally, LCCNs are in the news this week. Yesterday, the Library of Congress announced a “LCCN Permalink,” a smart bid to convert a vital but underused set of permanent, unique IDs, the LCCN (Library of Congress Control Number), into the regnant permanent, unqiue ID, the URL. See Catalogablog for the announcement.
