Some WorldCat entries putting journal abbr with Journal title?

dbergstone

We've been using WorldCat to match and download references for a bibliography we are transferring from an old database, but noticed that recent input from some WorldCat entries are including the Journal abbreviation in title so they are now showing up in Publication field, e.g. 'J American Culture The Journal of American Culture'

Anyone else having this issue or idea why it is doing that? Doesn't seem to be all titles and seems to be new issue. (our group is The vernacular Architecture Forum)

adamsmith

do you have a link for an item where that happens? It's almost certainly a problem on their end, but we may be able to work around it.

dbergstone

here's one reference that creating entry gives the abbr with the full title for publication:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/nineteenth-century-agricultural-journals-as-a-resource-for-material-culture-studies/oclc/5544903923&referer=brief_results

thanks for looking into this.

adamsmith

thanks. So yeah, this is the RIS they export for this item:
TY - JOUR
DB - /z-wcorg/
DP - http://worldcat.org
ID - 5544903923
LA - English
T1 - Nineteenth Century Agricultural Journals as a Resource for Material Culture Studies
Y1 - 1991///
SN - 0883-3680
JF - materialculture Material Culture
VL - 23
IS - 1
SP - 43
EP - 46
ER -


We can see what we can do about this, but as you can probably guess, this is more than just a little tricky.

Do any of the resident librarians/database folks know how to effectively report issues to OCLC? zuphilip, DWL?

dbergstone

Yes, there isn't an easy way to parse that out. Not seem to be on all journal entries either. Appreciate any help.

DWL-SDCA

Do any of the resident librarians/database folks know how to effectively report issues to OCLC?

I have not had consistently successful responses from OCLC. I've had very little success lately. (Perhaps, related to launch of Discovery?) I presume that each library's designated point of contact will be able to get to the right person. In the rare times that I reached the right person, OCLC has quickly resolved the problem.

zuphilip

@adamsmith: No, I have no contact to them. I just have heard several talks about linked data in worldcat. Maybe that could help, e.g. http://www.worldcat.org/title/nineteenth-century-agricultural-journals-as-a-resource-for-material-culture-studies/oclc/5544903923#rdfa (at the bottom of that page), or if you have permission (I don't have): http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/5544903923.jsonld

aurimas

Their linked metadata would be excellent, but their API is a bit unstable (or at least I haven't been able to get it to work well). I've contacted them about the API in April and actually got a response, but haven't looked at it since.

Just to quickly note, for http://www.worldcat.org/title/gandhi-the-story-of-my-experiments-with-truth/oclc/810485317 you can get RDF via http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1151002411.rdf I'm still not clear how to transform OCLC ID into the other ID, but there might be some documentation available. Also, to support this RDF, we would need to add http://schema.org/ vocabulary support to our RDF translator, which we should do anyway.

zuphilip

For linked data at oclc, you can try to ask https://twitter.com/rjw .