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New Feature
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Resolution: Fixed
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Normal
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None
WorldCat Identities is apparently been discontinued since March 26th
https://www.oclc.org/developer/api/oclc-apis/worldcat-identities.en.html
Old links now redirect to WorldCat Entities which have their own URI
https://www.worldcat.org/identities/ is 404 but from Google cache:
The OCLC Research WorldCat Identities project is ending. The work provided valuable insight into how to mine bibliographic data for insight into the People and Organizations that create and serve as subjects library materials. The findings demonstrated the power of data mining over the world’s largest set of bibliographic metadata and highlighted the value of collaborative collective cataloging. The WorldCat Identities data has positively impacted OCLC’s work to build the WorldCat Entities application and the 150 million Person and Work descriptions accessible through it. This work will continue to build our entity ecosystem to support the future knowledge work of librarians.
The WorldCat Identities web application will be retired and shut down in the coming months and the data is no longer being updated. The most recent version of the data is from July of 2022. As OCLC continues to build out the WorldCat Entities ecosystem, please use it as a source for persistent Person identifiers. https://id.oclc.org/worldcat/entity
Sting https://musicbrainz.org/artist/7944ed53-2a58-4035-9b93-140a71e41c34
used to be https://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n84157839 and is now https://id.oclc.org/worldcat/entity/E39PBJtCD4cBkp4m9Gfb88jKVC
The new URI needs to be whitelisted, URL cleanup updated (to remove potential ".html" at the end of the URL) and existing WorldCat links updated (if possible)
[MBS-13016] Allow, clean-up, and display WorldCat Entities URL
Thank you for reporting that WorldCat Identities has been replaced with WorldCat Entities.
In the documentation and in the website, only “WorldCat” is mentioned, not the name of the application, and it is probably fine to keep it as is there. So the code changes that you recommended to URL cleanup (allow and clean-up) are the main part indeed. The code for website display also needs to be updated to use the subdomain oclc.org and its favicon. I edited the ticket’s summary and type to reflect this.
Since WorldCat is redirecting from their Identities ID to their Entities ID, there is probably no point at keeping the old Identities ID for MusicBrainz entities that have Entities ID. If someone was using WorldCat Identities ID for mapping, they will have to update their data at some point anyway, and they can use WorldCat redirect to do that.
Since there currently are ~50K of old URLs in the database, here is a transition plan:
- Allow entering both (this MBS ticket) at first (which can be done quickly);
- Have a bot (in MBBE) to edit old URLs and turn them into new URLs;
- Bring (in MBS) an easy way for entering new URL from old URL in the external links editor (which can take a bit more time) and then block old URLs.
See code changes in pull request #2912 submitted by yvanzo.