Help talk:Using Worldcat data

Re: "19cm" is either a small tp/hc or a British pb, which tend to be a bit taller than US/Canadian ones. I think this is seriously misleading about British paperbacks: 17.5cm is a fairly standard British paperback, 19cm+ puts it firmly into Trade Paperback size. I know the Worldcat records round it to nearest centimetre, and Amazon UK are ridiculously precise on millimetre measurements, and the definition of trade paperback versus mass-market paperback doesn't really apply in the UK (except on size categorisation, which is all WE are really using it for) - but putting all Worldcat 19cm British paperbacks into "pb" category would frankly be WRONG. If people need to guess about British paperbacks from secondary sources, I'd say 18cm and below - "pb". 19cm and above - "tp". BLongley 23:56, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I borrowed that paragraph from Help:How to parse data in library catalogs. It was, according to the history, entered by User:Ahasuerus on 21 February 2008. I have no personal expertise with UK paperbacks, and have no objection if the section is re-writen by anyone who does have such expertise. -DES ^Talk 00:14, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

By the way, there are also the new "Reading size" extra tall paperbacks in the US, distributed in supermarkets and other mass-market outlets. They have the same width as a normal MMPB, but a couple of inches of additional height, i think -- i haven't measured. personally i hate this format, but books are being published in it -- not much science fiction that I have seen, but at least some horror ("oh, the horror" ;) ) -DES ^Talk 00:17, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I happen to be at my base of operations this weekend, so let me pull out my trusty slide rule, er, I mean measuring tape and see what's up. <sounds of books being juggled and numbers being punched into a calculator>. OK, the standard US paperback is between 6.75" (17.154cm) and 7" (17.78cm) while the standard UK paperback is between 7" (17.78cm) and 7.125" (18.1cm). However, since OCLC consistently uses "18cm" for US paperbacks and "17cm" for old Ace Doubles -- which were actually about 6.375" (16.2cm) -- they seem to be slightly overstating the length of US paperbacks.

The question then is whether OCLC uses "19cm" for UK paperbacks which are actually around 18cm? That's what I assumed a while back without doing the math, but now I am not so sure. To test the hypothesis, let me pull out a random UK paperback off the shelves and see what OCLC has to say about it... Hm, the experiment wasn't terribly successful at first since OCLC doesn't state the size of many UK editions, but the Arrow edition of James Blish's Anywhen (OCLC 16431219), the Mandarin edition of Eric Frank Russell's Deep Space (OCLC 20419023) and the Corgi edition of Garry Kilworth's House of Tribes (OCLC 43206160) are all listed as 18cm. Looks like I was mistaken after all and OCLC lists all mass market paperbacks, be they US or UK-published, the same way. Sorry about that! Ahasuerus 00:54, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

OCLC entries labeled [S.I.]

I run across entries sometime that are indicated as "[S.I.]" in place of the city of publication. I find that these are less complete than most OCLC entries. Does anyone have a clue what this might mean? Here's an example. The same title has a more complete entry but with a different publisher. I've come to the conclusion that the first entry is for a book never published. Any ideas? Also where can I find a general description or list of abbreviations that are used in cataloging entries into OCLC? I could find nothing on the website. MHHutchins 21:38, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

OCLC has its quirks, but this is a standard abbreviation used by the MARC family of bibliographic standards. "[S.l.]" stands for "place [of publication] is unknown" and is a legitimate value in field 260, "Publication, Distribution, etc. (Imprint)", sub-field "a". Analogously, "[s.n.]" stands for "name [of publisher] is unknown" and is used in sub-field "b" of the same field. There is more (much, much more!) on MARC21, the latest version of the MARC standard, at the main Library of Congress MARC21 page.

OCLC maintains its own set of guidelines for data entry here. They mostly follow the MARC21 standard, but sometimes they let their librarians deviate from it to accommodate pre-existing practices, which makes Fixer's life even more interesting than it would be otherwise... Ahasuerus 22:16, 22 April 2009 (UTC)