Validate ISBN and other cataloger input

[Sinath Kim]

The metadata input (click into a title, then edit metadata) has no control imposed upon it. I randomly entered a series of numbers for the isbn-10, and random characters in other sections and everything was accepted. I think it's important to control input for information integrity.

[Sinath Kim (sinath-kim)]

To be more specific in my comments, I was thinking:
-pull down options for such things as physical format, language
-controlling the amount of alphanumeric characters that can be entered into standard number fields
-decreasing the amount of available fields
            -is GTIN, UPC, UCC, EAN-UCC all necessary?
            -not sure what is suppose to go into title prefix field
            -not sure what is suppose to go into work field
            -do we need both a language field and a language code field?
            -we should have a field for Library of Congress classification (at the moment we only have one for
             dewey decimal classisfication)
            -is LCCN field necessary?
-keep the ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 fields together (at the moment it is separated by UCC-13 field)
-give an indication as to which fields will appear on the book screen. I noticed that the bio field does not show up there.

[George (george-archive)]

Addressed somewhat in redesign.

[Avram Lyon (ajlyon)]

I've been working on ISBN and ISSN validation for the Zotero project (in progress) and can submit that validation can't be strict-- there are cases of invalid ISBNs in the wild, since publishers are unfortunately not always careful when assigning them. Our plan is to simply flag invalid identifiers, so the user can double-check that they have entered the data correctly from the book.

[Avram Lyon (ajlyon)]

Apparently my concern and proposed behavior has already been raised in the closely related bug #485999.