We’ve added a link to Blackwell’s online bookshop to every book catalogue record on our catalogue.
Books bought via these links (or via http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/lincoln) attract a 5% discount, and free delivery on orders over £20. The Blackwell Connect shop at the University (located in the foyer of the GCW University Library) is open 10am-4pm Monday-Friday from Monday 19th September until Friday 11th November 2011.
Unfortunately, quite a few of the links don’t work, because the catalogue record contains additional, parenthetical trailing free text [examples: …(pbk.) …(hbk.) …(ebk.)] after the 10- or 13-digit ISBN itself, all within the MARC 020 $a field – and this additional trailing text breaks Blackwell’s URL structure.
This sort of thing might be standard cataloguing practice: but unfortunately it’s a practice that leads to unusable—and certainly not “MAchine-Readable“—data, especially in a field that contains such a useful unique ID. See the Robot Librarian’s blog post on why …(pbk.) drives him “absolutely batshit crazy“.
Without recataloguing or mass-MARC-editing every record in our collection, I’m not sure how we can fix this. Possibly some kind of Yahoo! Pipes hack is in order: honestly, I’m not sure I have the energy.
Here’s an example of a ‘bad’ link to Blackwell’s, as generated by our catalogue. And, just to prove it’s not just Blackwell that suffers, here’s a link to the same book in Amazon: again generated by HiP; again broken.
(Technical note: the links to Blackwell’s which appear on each catalogue record page are in the form “http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/id/{{x}}/?alumni=A1041″ …where {{x}} is the contents of the first MARC 020 $a field – which should be an ISBN of the book. The link will only appear if the MARC record contains an 020 field.)
