Thanks for clearing that up Andy. Just for information, it is possible
to generate the hyphenation programmatically:
http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/international/hyphenation-instructions.asp
Nik
Nik Jewell wrote:
> Paul Hollands wrote:
>
>> Hi Andy,
>>
>> The use of hyphens in the ISBN and ISSN examples may cause some
>> confusion. My understanding is that ISBNs/ISSNs are agnostic about the
>> hyphens and they are included only for reasons of legibility when
>> printed on book spines etc.. I don't believe MARC cataloguers are
>> required to use them (could be wrong). Maybe a note about the ISBNs and
>> ISSNs being valid with or without them might be useful?? Or am I totally
>> mistaken?
>
>
> I don't think(?) you are mistaken - I've been doing some investigation
> of this, as we have a few hundred ISBNs in our database that are encoded
> without hyphenation.
>
> My first thought was that we could correct this with a regex of SQL
> substring statement, but the problem is that the middle two strings in
> the ISBN: n - XXXX - XXXX - n/X, publisher and book, are of variable
> length so this can not be automated in this way. This link explains
> the format clearly:
>
> http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/international/html/usm4.htm
>
> The ISBNs ended up in our database in the first place without
> hyphenation because some were retrieved from Amazon's SOAP service, and
> Amazon returns ISBNs sans hyphenation.
>
> My second thought was pondering some form of lookup service to library
> databases, but marc records do not appear to contain hyphenation (as
> Paul suggests), so this is not a goer either (I've checked a few library
> catalogues and there is no hyphenation).
>
> My third thought was the checksum information. This is explained clearly
> here:
>
> http://www.morovia.com/education/utility/upc-ean.asp (scroll to bottom)
>
> However, whilst I am not of a mathematical bent, there doesn't seem any
> way to reverse the process because if you look at the weighting table it
> makes no particular distinction regarding the publisher/book split.
> Maybe somebody is cleverer than me here?
>
> I'm not seeing any way to recover the information (ie
> hyphenation/spaces) in a programmatic way, nor even anywhere on the web
> where I can look up our books and get hyphenated information returned
> (anybody know of anywhere ?)
>
> A trip to the library and taking the books off the shelves is the only
> solution I see at the moment.
>
> Cheers
>
> Nik
>
>
>>
>> Cheers.
>>
>> Andy Powell wrote:
>>
>>> I don't think I've formally announced the document at
>>>
>>> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi-ieee/identifiers/
>>>
>>> though it did get briefly mentioned in a previous thread about
>>> identifiers
>>> on this list. Anyway, I've just been going over the document to
>>> tidy up
>>> one or two loose ends so it seems appropriate to mention it again :-)
>>>
>>> It provides guidelines for encoding a number of commonly used
>>> identifiers
>>> in DC metadata and IEEE LOM records and recommends always encoding
>>> identifiers as URIs.
>>>
>>> As always, comment, corrections, etc. are very welcome.
>>>
>>> Andy
>>> --
>>> Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
>>> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell/ +44 1225 383933
>>> Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/
>>> ECDL 2004, Bath, UK - 12-17 Sept 2004 - http://www.ecdl2004.org/
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>> Paul Hollands <[log in to unmask]>
>> LTSN-01 Information and Web Support Officer
>> University of Newcastle, 16/17 Framlington Place
>> Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4AB
>> 0191 222 5888
>> <http://www.ltsn-01.ac.uk/>
>
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