Template talk:LCCN8

Adding option for Chronicling America

(I originally posted about this at Template talk:LCCN, but it occurs to me that this template is probably more suited to this use case.)

The Library of Congress's Chronicling America project uses LCCNs, but many of these LCCNs are not recognized by lccn.loc.gov. This seems to be because the LCCN server only serves up results for LoC holdings, and LCCNs starting with "sn" are part of CONSER and "may or may not be in LC". As a result, even though there is a responsive page on loc.gov for these LCCNs, this template frequently points to an empty search results page instead.

• Example 1 (not in LoC, in Chronicling America): LCCN sn90-51192 ("Your search found no results") - Chronicling America page
• Example 2 (in LoC, also in Chronicling America): LCCN sn82-14988 (LoC card catalog entry) - Chronicling America page

I have created a sandbox template that changes the URL to the Chronicling America version if parameter "chronicling=yes" is supplied. I have put some test cases here (lifted from Template:LCCN/testcases plus the above examples).

This is a low-usage template (13 transclusions) and I do not see any issues with the test cases. So if there are no objections in 24 hours I will implement this change and add the "chronicling=yes" option. -- Visviva (talk) 19:00, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

@Visviva: I considered making similar changes as I did at Module:LCCN (affecting {{LCCN}}) but as demonstrated by your User:Visviva/LCCN8/testcases, that would break authority LCCNs like LCCN no2009148796. lccn.loc.gov also supports LCCNs from the Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS) OPAC with LCCNs like LCCN bi2021000008 which would also be broken if links where moved to www.loc.gov/item. {{LCCN}} is at least documented as "used for referring to books" so it is a little less problematic. I do find it odd that lccn.loc.gov supports the HLAS OPAC but not all of Chronicling America (since LoC hosts both of those). —Uzume (talk) 21:16, 12 May 2024 (UTC)