Author: ui2t5v002

Description:
This is similar in concept to the magic ISBN numbers we already have, but I
think a different implementation would be superior.

LCCNs have two forms. Regular form that you would find in books (89-456), and
normalized form, used for machine-readable stuff (89000456).

See http://www.loc.gov/marc/lccn-namespace.html for the normalization rules.

We have a template {{LCCN}} to handle them now, but, since we have no string
manipulation capabilities on the user side, it's ugly and hard to use.

The magic ISBN feature is nice, but instead of "LCCN 71-143545" being rendered
directly as a link, I'd rather just have a flexible parserfunction like
urlencode to convert regular form into normalized form. Like
"{{lccn:n78-89035}}" would output "n78089035".

Then the numbers can be used in different ways in different places. The
standard template's link target and display formatting could remain controllable
by users, while the normalized number could be used by itself in
machine-readable COinS tags in citation templates, for instance.

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:LCCN