[OPEN-ILS-DEV] oISBN for beginner

[Bryan Baldus]

I'm interested in attempting to make use of oISBN (if I understand oISBN correctly) to identify previous versions/editions of something we are cataloging and using the information from the previous edition to help create the record for the new edition (for example, to take the Dewey number from the 082 of the previous edition). I have a very limited familiarity with Evergreen-related or network-based programming (my programming experience has been devoted to local file manipulation), so I'm not sure how to begin or what needs to be done in order to have Evergreen provide me with a list of the older ISBNs if I give it a newer ISBN. I'm hoping to use Perl, but am also interested in learning whether the oISBN process/retrieving the ISBNs can be done in a way similar to that used to search the Library of Congress' servers (SRU?--I have no idea, but one of our programmers has been working on something that retrieves records from LC as part of this project).

So, my thinking on the steps involved:

1. Set up VirtualBox-based Evergreen server on a Windows XP host (and/or Vista).

2. Load our records (ranging from level-3 vendor-style MARC records to full-level MARC 21 records) into the Evergreen virtual image.

3. After loading new level-3 minimal records (ISBN, cover-based title, publisher, vendor (distributor)), ask Evergreen for any previous ISBNs related to the current record's ISBN.

4. Associate the previous ISBNs with a unique ID (stock number/control number of the current record) in a tab-delimited text file for processing separately in Windows.

5. Search for the ISBNs in a file of MARC records, retrieve any Deweys, and associate the old records' Deweys with the new record.

Steps 3 and 4, asking Evergreen for the older ISBNs and saving them to a file on the Windows host machine, pose the biggest problem.

Thank you for your assistance,

Bryan Baldus
Cataloger
Quality Books Inc.
The Best of America's Independent Presses
1-800-323-4241x402
bryan.baldus at quality-books.com
eijabb at cpan.org
http://home.comcast.net/~eijabb/