Bowerbird wrote:
karen said:
Suggestion: have a competition to design an open-source cataloging system for e-books, where there are no physical constraints on "shelving." Publicize it in library schools. Major ego-boo for the teacher/graduate student whose scheme is accepted, free design for PG.
answer this question: why should we categorize the e-texts?
Actually, I think what we'd like to do is to "categorize" the texts using one or more categorical systems, and then embed that information right into the book (which is a digital object). This is essentially adding metadata, or what the Yahoo folk call "microformats" (which is a terrible name), right into the object. This is done now in many kinds of digital objects, such as audio, video and some ebook formats. This way no external categorization need to be applied -- it is all recorded internally, meaning each book can become autonomous of the others since it carries its own metadata. Particular "libraries" can build a lookup table of their choosing by simply sniffing through all the texts it holds. It doesn't really matter where the text files are placed or organized in a file structure. Multiple categorization systems can be supported in parallel provided the texts carry the requisite information. In XML, there's a number of ways this info could be embedded. In plain text documents, some sort of machine recognizable "plain text" syntax has to be developed -- it'd be quite simple, actually. I think those who advocate plain text should develop a "plain text" metadata system (such as one based on Dublin Core) to insert somewhere in the file. Jon Noring