On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Lee Passey <lee@novomail.net> wrote:
I'm particularly interested in hearing from Ms. Lofstrom with suggestions about what WEM metadata should be collected, and how it might be structured and retained.
From my USER point of view, PG gives next to no usable information to
I only know that metadata are important, from dipping into librarian blogs and also from my own struggles to find, retrieve, and store ebooks. Lee, you clearly know more than I do about the librarian end of things. Librarians who are awake to the value of information technology and struggling to organize their own institutional digital repositories would be the best resources here. I'm thinking of Dorothea Salo, who used to blog about such issues before ... well, I'm reasonably certain that her bosses ordered her not to rock the boat. [Sidenote: a few years ago, I attended a conference of Pacific librarians. What I saw was a gathering ot timid bureaucrats, dependent on public funding, who were not going to do anything new unless it had been proven SAFE by someone else. That's what Dorothea was bucking.] people searching for books. Organized by author and title. That's all. I would want info re date and place of publication, publisher, and genre. Birth and death dates of author. If a serial publication, volume and number, and the run of the publication. (I might want to look at all the books and periodicals published in London in 1882. No way to do it now, and it ought to be easy.) I would want LOC and Dewey Decimal and other such numbers (dunno about schemes used in non-American libraries) stored with the book info so that I could find all versions of a book, e, paper, whatever. I would want to know WHEN the book was first digitized and WHEN it had been corrected, if at all. (That's important for judging the reliability of the text.) I would want a good library search engine. When you use a library database, you're stuck with antiquated interfaces that only recognize certain terms in a certain order. Nothing at all like Google, which can give you answers even if your queries are loose and impressionistic. Finally, I'd want a recommendation system like the ones used by Amazon or Netflix. Ideally, I'd also like to be able to download software to organize my books on my home computer. Right now I have several thousand books that are labeled only by title and author (Villette - Bronte) and "shelved" in a homegrown folder system. Frex, Villette would be in the folder Bronte C, which would be in the folder 19th century - England. I don't think this is the best system; it's not even a good one. But it's what I can do without having to code something myself. (I'm not a programmer; I got the only C I ever got in my life in second-semester Java programming.) If PG books had all the necessary metadata and I had a program that could read that data, the program could organize my books for me. Oh, and I'd like to be able to download ALL of an author's books at once, instead of having to do it painfully and slowly one by one. I suppose I still think like an academic. If I'm interested in Joseph Altsheler, I want to see everything he published. That's a user's POV, not a librarian's and not a programmer's. I don't think that anything in my list is undoable. It's all been done. It's just a matter of assembling the pieces. Yes, it looks easy from the outside. I'm guilty of "why don't we" -- often encountered in meetings -- which translates to "I have a keen idea, why don't YOU do it." Still, I've put in eight years and thousands of pages at DP, so it's not all "you do the work". -- Karen Lofstrom