Dave: That's exactly the point. We couldn't expect anyone to do that. Other than having a miraculous grant from somewhere to hire a professional librarian for a couple of years. :) However, variations on what are sometimes called "Social tagging" schemes might be workable in our case. This may lack the precision of traditional library cataloging, but it is much better than nothing, has flexibility to reflect the aspects that volunteers are interested in, and can be easily contributed to by many people. Simply making lists, as I mentioned earlier, does not fulfill my vision of the full potential, but perhaps is a place to start for now. Andrew On Sat, 12 Aug 2006, Dave Fawthrop wrote:
On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:49:55 -0700, "Jared Buck" <JBuck814366460@aol.com> wrote:
|Hey, would there be any way we could be able to create a system for |searching by subject matter for books? I have a mind to create a CD of |books about and by native american indians for a girl i really like and |the search mechanism is just not robust enough, searching full text |takes too much time either. Being able to enter a single term under |subject should be able to bring up a whole list of books related to that |subject matter. Like, searching for science fiction should bring up a |list of books that ARE science fiction, not just books with the words |"science fiction" in the title or in the text.
Are you volunteering to read and categorise all 18,000 books, then write the program?