[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Covers and ISBNs

[Dan Scott]

On Thu, Oct 06, 2011 at 04:14:16PM -0400, Gordana Vitez wrote:
> Hi Brian,
>  
> We came across the same problem back in the summer and I think the only thing to do is ask the materials provider to switch the order. I did get a good explanation from Galen and I'll include it here:
>  
> "For what it's worth, arranging the 020s so that the ISBN-13 comes first, 
> followed by the ISBN-10, is actually supposed to be the standard 
> behavior. For example, see:
> 
> http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/020-13%20plan.pdf 
> http://www.ingrambook.com/isbn13/libraries/default.asp#4 

For what it's worth, at least in the context of BibTemplate, it wouldn't
be too hard to teach the code to iterate through all of the possible
ISBNs and find the 10-digit ones. The issue is that rdetail.js is using
the record.isbn() value, which comes from the old slim MODS
representation of the bibliographic data. Ripping out the pertinent code
from rdetail.js and dropping it into the rdetail_summary.xml /
result_table.xml display would be how I would go about doing such a
thing if I were to do such a thing as quickly as possible with minimal
disruption. We're already doing part of that at Conifer, just to show
all of the ISBNs for a given record: see http://ur1.ca/5bjbu for
example; extending that to say "okay, just give me the 10-digit ISBN"
wouldn't be much more work.

Of course, a better way to handle this might be to push the logic down
into the added content layer, such that each added content provider
would be responsible for pulling out the preferred ISBN - or ISSN, or
UPC, or other identifiers of interest beyond the currently limited
ISBN-only approach - and sending that to the added content service. Jeff
Godin had started towards this approach at the Evergreen hackfest in
2011, it would be great to move along that path further.