Greg Newby wrote:
The catalog software could then update a number of fields (Subject, LoC Class, Unified Title) automatically from the LoC database (TODO Check copyright status of LoC database !!!)
I like this idea, but am concerned that there will still need to be human oversight. Just importing records will only work if there are unambiguous matches, and it seems that matching is often ambiguous.
We can start to match the easy ones and leave the hard ones to our librarians. We can periodically output a list of still unmatched books. The fields I propose to import (Subject, LoC, Unified Title) should not be ambiguous. It doesn't matter which edition of a work we match. OTOH for new books still in the DP queue it might be wiser to match the exact edition down to the format and number of pages and the coffee stain on page 42. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org