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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 mid-2007 when the DLF was reabsorbed into CLIR to form https://www.diglib.org. Current best practices may vary.

The following tables list Author Identifiers and Edition Identifiers, including the identifier name, description, example, and link to additional documentation.

Author Identifiers

IDDescriptionExampleDocs
OLIDOpen Library author recordOL1234AOpen Library API
LCAuthLibrary of Congress authority IDhttps://id.loc.gov/authorities/no2013090983Library of Congress Authorities
VIAF IDVirtual International Authority File identifiere.g. 12345678VIAF
ISNIInternational Standard Name Identifiere.g. 000000012146438XISNI
ORCIDOpen Researcher and Contributor ID0000-0001-2345-6789ORCID
WD IDWikidata item identifierQ6290611Wikidata

Edition Identifiers

IDDescriptionExampleDocs
OCLCidOCLC control numbere.g. 12345678OCLC Help
LCCNLibrary of Congress Control Numbere.g. 2002022641LCCN Namespace
OLIDOpen Library IDOL234MOpen Library API
OCAIDOpen Content Alliance ID (Archive.org item identifier)e.g. 12345678Archive.org
HTIDHathi Trust IDe.g. HT123456789Hathi Trust Data
Google IDGoogle Books IDzyTCAlFPjgYCGoogle Books Partner Help

Open Library identifiers on Archive.org

Archive.org and Open Library items were previously connected using a metadata field called openlibrary on Archive.org and a field called ocaid on Open Library (short for Open Content Alliance ID; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Content_Alliance).

These openlibrary IDs became stale and were rarely used. Two new fields were added to replace the openlibrary field on Archive.org: 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, you can use this ID to pull the MARC record from Open Library to verify metadata matches. Alternatively, if you have a book on Archive.org (for example, jungleauthoritat00sinc) with an openlibrary_edition of OL3561303M, you can retrieve the JSON API data at https://openlibrary.org/books/OL3561303M.json to check the values without needing the MARC record.

Open Library

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

Archive.org identifiers

xml
<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>