Guide to Identifiers

Best practices were discussed at http://webservices.itcs.umich.edu/mediawiki/oaibp/index.php/IdentifyingTheResource although that site has been frozen since, in mid-2007, the DLF was reabsorbed into the CLIR to form https://www.diglib.org. Not sure where current best practices abide.

Name identifiers

• olid - Open Library author record (e.g. OL1234A, one (or more) records intended to refer to an author)
• lcauth - Library of Congress authority ID (e.g. https://id.loc.gov/authorities/no2013090983 )
• viaf id - Virtual International Authority File identifier, records federated from many national name authority files by the OCLC, with one (or more) viaf id per author (c.f. https://viaf.org/)
• isni - International Standard Name Identifier per ISO27729, one isni per author (c.f. http://www.isni.org/ )
• orcid - Open Researcher and Contributor ID, one orcid per author identity (occasionally per pseudonym, c.f. https://orcid.org )
• wdt id - Wikidata item as used for a person or identity (e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6290611 )

Edition identifiers

• oclcid - OCLC control number (many oclcids may refer to records for one edition: use the smallest number; c.f. https://help.oclc.org/Discovery_and_Reference/WorldCat-org/WorldCat-org_Item_Details_screen/About_the_Item_Details_screen)
• lccn - Library of Congress Control Number (c.f. https://www.loc.gov/marc/lccn-namespace.html )
• olid - Open Library ID (e.g. OL123W, OL234M, etc)
• ocaid - Open Content Alliance ID (i.e. Archive.org item identifier)
• htid - Hathi Trust ID (c.f. https://www.hathitrust.org/data )
• googleid - Google Books ID (c.f. https://support.google.com/books/partner/answer/3474239 )

Open Library identifiers on Archive.org

Back in the day, we used to connect Archive.org <=> OpenLibrary.org items using a metadata field called openlibrary on Archive.org and a field called ocaid on OpenLibrary.org (which stands for Open Content Alliance ID — see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Content_Alliance).

@mek noticed these openlibrary IDs were very stale and had not been used for a while. So 2 new fields were added (in attempt to deprecate openlibrary field on Archive.org). These are openlibrary_edition and openlibrary_work.

If I recall @hank and @judec informed me the openlibrary metadata key is actually being used in certain places within our derive pipelines — this code has never been updated to use openlibrary_edition and openlibrary_work.

Retrieving Archive.org data for an Open Library identifier

For any given openlibrary_edition one should be able to use this ID pull the MARC from Open Library to confirm if the metadata matches. Or even more easily — let’s say you have a book on archive.org called… jungleauthoritat00sinc

And its metadata lists its openlibrary_edition as OL3561303M.

If you use https://openlibrary.org/books/OL3561303M.json it will return the json API data for that book and you can check the values without necessarily even needing the MARC

OpenLibrary

covers: [253146],
ocaid: "jungleauthoritat00sinc",
key: "/books/OL3561303M",
identifiers: {
  goodreads: ["54855"],
  librarything: ["3414"]
},
lccn: ["2002026536"],
isbn_10: ["039397779X"],

Archive.org identifiers

<isbn>9780393977790</isbn>
<isbn>039397779X</isbn>
<openlibrary>OL3561303M</openlibrary>
<external-identifier>urn:asin:039397779X</external-identifier>
<external-identifier>urn:acs6:jungleauthoritat00sinc:pdf:0c7cfd74-4178-4606-aad6-82c7dd226004</external-identifier>
<external-identifier>urn:acs6:jungleauthoritat00sinc:epub:e2b0f076-2d77-44b4-bbbd-75e14c654c2c</external-identifier>
<external-identifier>urn:oclc:record:1035882283</external-identifier>
<boxid>IA1138320</boxid>
<identifier>jungleauthoritat00sinc</identifier>
<containerid>S0022</containerid>
<identifier-access>http://archive.org/details/jungleauthoritat00sinc</identifier-access>
<identifier-ark>ark:/13960/t9n33ns5x</identifier-ark>
<oclc-id>473022932</oclc-id>
<oclc-id>492015570</oclc-id>
<oclc-id>50143929</oclc-id>
<oclc-id>611841594</oclc-id>
<oclc-id>750905675</oclc-id>
<oclc-id>845516453</oclc-id>
<oclc-id>849008372</oclc-id>
<lccn>2002026536</lccn>