Re: Schema.org and "Holdings"

HI Karen:

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 8:09 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:
> Dan, thanks so much for this. I think we need to extend your experiment to
> some other holdings displays (ebook, periodical).

Agreed. Actually the existing sample does include an electronic
resource that matches what we do in our production system; that is,
throw the ISSNs or ISBNs for a record into our OpenURL resolver, find
out if we have any hits, and display the electronic resource(s) on the
same page as the physical resource. This has varying levels of
accuracy, as you can imagine, but generally users are happy to look
over the returned description of the resource and take the electronic
option if it seems to be a match.

As for periodicals, yes, absolutely, I'll generate some sample data to
work with alternate representations. Evergreen is a good test
platform, as it supports periodical holdings in a few different ways:

* Summary holding statements, as in your "v.13(1991),
v.20(2000)-v.32:3(2001)" example
  ** These can be generated either from manually maintained MFHD
records, or from the serials prediction/receiving/etc infrastructure
* Per-issue displays, which are similar to copy displays, from the
serials prediction/receiving/etc infrastructure (typically for
periodicals that the library wants to circulate)
* Electronic resource holdings, which often come from a separate
OpenURL system and which offer a link, a description of the coverage
(with or without an end date), and the embargo period (if applicable)

For the former type of holding statements, which generally get
generated at a deeper level of the library system, I'm not sure how
granular we can get. You have a note in your Holdings page
(http://www.w3.org/community/schemabibex/wiki/Holdings) about possibly
using the "owns" property here, but that needs to point at a Product,
and given that in the context of the record display the record itself
is the Product (via an additionalType), I'm not sure that's going to
play out. I'm going to have to dig deeper to see if there's something
sane we can do with existing schema.org here, but I suspect that this
might be an area where a schema.org extension is warranted. The best
I've been able to come up with so far is, if we wrap the summary
statement in an Offer, is to reuse the inherited Thing.description,
which is a bit general.

For periodicals represented as individual, circulating issues, I think
we can reuse most of what we've done with the copy Offers.

Electronic resource holding statements are going to be similar to
summary holding statements, although at least we have a URL for the
Offer.

> I'm especially curious to
> see how to handle something like a book that is checked out (OutOfStock) but
> where the library offers an online 'place hold' service. How can we
> highlight those services?

I think I covered this in my other response; for Evergreen, in some
libraries, it's easy enough to use the Offer.url property to point at
the corresponding Place Hold web page.

> I'm a bit nervous about linking the ISBN to the item -- the ISBN will be
> recorded in the schema/Book description, but, as we've argued at length on
> the BIBFRAME list, library data often has multiple ISBNs but these are not
> associated with individual copies. In fact, the library may not even have a
> copy for each ISBN in its bibliographic record.

Yeah.I assume they came from copy cataloging a different edition or
transcription errors or any other number of ways that bad data get
into systems. I'm not sure what to say to this other than... that's
the data that we have at hand, and we're presenting that ISBN (or
those ISBNs) to humans today. I'm not sure we can or should try to
solve the problem of possibly advertising incorrect ISBNs at the
schema.org level; bad data is bad data.

> Jeff suggested a while back something about listing the price as $0. I don't
> think that conveys the concept of lending, even though the price is right.
> It feels to me that we need something that means "lending" as well as the
> ability to give the loan period. I don't see anything similar to this in
> schema.org -- maybe I'm missing it?

Agreed. We need to disambiguate between "price == $0 and you can keep
it forever" and "price == $0 and you can keep it for a limited period
of time". There doesn't seem to be a way to represent this in
schema.org today, and other businesses loan items (typically with a
fee attached) so it definitely warrants an extension. Action item! And
yes, a loan period would be good as an optional attribute, but I
suspect in most library systems it will go empty due to the complexity
of accurately representing how long a given person can borrow a given
item. (Or at least, so it seems to me in my academic library, with
many different kinds of borrowers and item types and locations and
statuses...)

> If I get a chance (not until next week, at least) I'll see if I can't mock
> up some other examples, but of course if anyone else has some time...

Awesome! Many thanks for your thoughts, Karen.

Received on Friday, 12 July 2013 21:23:44 UTC