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liamc222 · May 4, 2019

Dear Sir/Madam,
I hope that this message finds you well.

I am writing to report an error that I have just discovered with your ISBN data cataloging. The book 'Responding to the Culture of Death', by John R Ling, with the ISBN number 9781903087268 has been cataloged as the book 'He Made the Stars also', by Stuart Burgess, with the ISBN number of 9781846251207.

Using both ISBNs brought up the Burgess's book rather than the first one bringing up Ling's book and the second bringing up Burgess's book.

You can do whatever you wish with this information, however, it would be good for people using this in the future if you could amend this issue.

Many thanks,

Liamc222.

dstillman · May 4, 2019

The data doesn't come from us. You'd want to report this to WorldCat, where it's listed for both books:

https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=results_page&q=isbn:9781903087268

(It's also possible the publisher needs to fix this. I'm not sure of the exact process for correcting data in WorldCat.)

If you do report this, don't mention Zotero, which isn't relevant and will likely confuse matters.

adamsmith · May 4, 2019

(Worldcat is a federated library catalog, so one contributing library putting in the wrong ISBN is enough to get it into the catalog; I believe the only way to get this fixed is to go through a participating library: https://help.oclc.org/Discovery_and_Reference/WorldCat_Discovery/Troubleshooting/How_can_I_get_incorrect_information_in_a_record_in_WorldCat_corrected )

DWL-SDCA · May 5, 2019

@adamsmith is correct and this will need to be corrected by a participating library. However, it is my experience, while working through my university, that it can require extraordinary effort and evidence for the OCLC to make changes to WorldCat. Two times the OCLC insisted that we determine the member that provided the erroneous data had have that library make the correction. We didn’t bother to do that after our frustration that demonstrating the conflict was not sufficient for them to take action. In my own experience ISBN conflicts aren’t common but are somewhat more common than rare.