Yes, one of the biggest issues I see with Grid Services is the fact that the documentation is not up to date. As a result, there are lots of misconceptions that people have about the services, which result in people not using them. I’ve heard from several folks at OCLC whom I’ve spoke to face to face that they are working on it but its also nice to have Alice say the same thing in the comments here.

Karen

@Karen – The main issue when I’ve played xISBN is that it can get a lot of related isbns. If xisbn had some way to just stick to one edition or some way to indicate it’s an earlier edition that might be useful. I suppose you could always join that with something different. (For example, different editions of Shakespeare isn’t so big. For textbooks though you might only want recent editions.)

As the CIO of Bowker, I’m responsible for the Syndetics products technology. I’m sorry you have experienced some performance issues. We at Bowker are very concerned about the quality of our customer’s experience. I would like to talk to you further regarding this issue. Please contact me via phone or E-Mail.

Thanks for your frank comments.

Sy Inwentarz
Sy.Inwentarz@Bowker.com 973-886-0570

Cover art seems to be a challenge for everyone, these days. WorldCat.org has had to overcome some cover art hurdles in the past, too.

I wanted to ask you more about your wish #2 for biographical data about people. Is it something like a *richer* WorldCat Identities you are after? Or something else entirely?

And to Jill’s point–there are enough things you have to keep track of in your own library, much less keeping track of everything going on at OCLC. And although you can find a lot of information on what is available for programmers on the OCLC Developer Network wiki, we are in the planning stages of upgrading and expanding that site. Besides improving it overall, our aim is for it to be the central location to find everything from code libraries to widgets. As always, we’re interested to know what you would like to see there, and we’ll be asking for specific input from the subscribers to the Developer Network listserv (see the web site above for the link).

Therefore, when a new project comes along, we don’t automatically think we can use an OCLC tool because we think we’ll be charged for it.

A really awesome replacement for Syndectics is Amazon which is what we use. There’s not the drag of response and we get a credit every time a user clicks through to Amazon from the library. Not that Amazon has this credit system set-up in a way libraries can fully use it with a library purchasing account but still it’ll be there one day & we’ll have a large number of credits banked!

Xisbn, for example, I have used on a few reports here where we’re trying to compare our collection to a list of materials that are being assigned in classes. For monographs I did a couple different attempts at mapping. Primarily I did two reports ,one that used combination of author and titles pulled from the list and from our indexes. That was largely successful for older material with well established names. Then for the cases of name changes, textbooks,etc I used the list of isbn of the assigned materail we had and then used xisbn to build a list of isbns from different editions etc.

(It would be really cool if you could tweak xisbn further and have it restrict to things like xisbns for the same editions or multiple editions, etc).

I do think one huge obstacle for larger scale and more innovative use of these is simply the lack of research time. R&D time seems very valuable for the type of folks most likely to use these services, a bit of a catch-22. (The amount of knowledge required to use some of them, while not great, is also a barrier as well).