Yeah, I over-simplifed and mis-stated. My current code, against a weird IA admin form that is scrapable and useable as an API even though not intended as such -- does use author/title text, in fact, not just ISBNs. In fact, it can't use ISBNs even when I'd like to.
The current code has been in production for a few years, and works. But I'd kind of like to switch it over to the actual supported OL API. But I kind of want to know how many full text books I might be losing access to if I make this switch, because they are in IA but not OL. This is reasonable, yes? [My code works from a 'known item', and tries to find matches in IA/OL. When I have an ISBN, I'd like to use it, to avoid false positives. Just author/title gets you lots of false positives. But in fact my current code doesn't do this, it always uses author/title. And an OL API implementation could do that too if desired. So this is really an orthogonal question. ] On 2/2/2011 12:17 PM, Lee Passey wrote: > On Wed, February 2, 2011 8:29 am, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: > >> Can you give us a broad overview of how many IA books with full text >> have marc records, and how many don't, and what sorts of sources don't >> have marc records? > This would be interesting data. > >> I have some old (pre-OL) code that searches for IA full text via ISBN >> through a kind of crufty means. I am considering switching it over to >> the OL api, but want to know how many hits I might be missing if I do that. > While I cannot speak for the OL catalog team, I would guess that searching for > IA text using the OL api would be much more effective than trying to use ISBN. > Why? ISBNs didn't come into existence until 1966, and the vast majority of > texts at IA (at least those accessible to the general public) will be those in > the public domain, i.e. those published before 1923. If you try to search via > ISBN you will get, at best, modern reprints of the classics. > > ISBNs might be a good way to find /catalog data/ about /modern/ books, but > they are unlikely to lead you to full text (actually, the full text at IA is > virtually unusable, but at least it would get you to the page scans). > _______________________________________________ > Ol-tech mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > [email protected] _______________________________________________ Ol-tech mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
