In announcement to the code4lib mailing list today Eric Hellman made the following announcement:

At about 4PM EST on Tuesday, February 14 13, a switch will be flipped, and traffic aimed at the experimental version of xISBN will begin to be routed to a replacement xISBN service supported by the Openly Informatics Division of OCLC. Any application that follows http redirects- this should be most xISBN client applications- will continue to work without needing changes. The timing of this switch has been dictated by the decommissioning of a server, and we apologize if this short notice seriously impacts anyone.

After the switch, the traffic currently sent to “http://labs.oclc.org/xisbn/[ISBN]“ will be redirected to http://old-xisbn.oclc.org/webservices/xisbn/[ISBN].

Eric goes on to say:

As you might guess from the replacement system host name, there will soon be a “new” version of the xISBN service. Xiaoming Liu, who has been working on xISBN for 3 months, will unveil the “WorldCat xISBN Service” at the Code4Lib conference at the end of the month.

As I discussed in July last year, when a production quality version of xISBN was announced, it will be a welcome addition the growing set of distributed dependable Library specific Web Services along side the Talis Platform APIs

As to the commercial model for the Worldcat xISBN Service there might be a clue in this bit from the email:

If you expect your xISBN client service to use more than 1000 queries per day, please let us know…

As a participant at the Code4Lib Conference, coincidentally talking about Library Web Service APIs, I look forward to Xiaoming Liu’s unveiling.

Update: Eric obviously has affairs of the heart on his mind - he has just updated his message to say that the big switchover will be February 13th, not 14th. 

Share This