At 11:06 AM 11/9/2004, you wrote:
Andrew Sly wrote:
Taken all together, the PG online catalog does present plently of information that can help people interact with the collection in meaningful ways; but it may make professional librarians roll their eyes.
The design philosophy of the catalog database is:
To help people find a book they may want to read.
That includes both, people who already know which book they want and people who want a suggestion.
The catalog database was not designed to be a tool for professionals. But this doesn't mean that I'm not willing to add some functions to help them out, so long as those functions don't get in the way of the primary functionality.
Producing MARC records out of existing catalog entries seems to be a pretty forward thing.
Obviously it is not an _easy_ pretty forward thing! Otherwise, the whole thing would be in place by now. On the other hand, PG database may not be capable of the Z39.50 imports but there are many MANY (if not all!) library cataloging software packages that will do it in a short time. The advantage of importing from the existing catalog entries is that we have our pick of what fits our needs for especially the subject fields. Of course there is always work to edit and customize them for the PG user database. I don't see why we can't have a commercial software to do most of the work and keep the existing catalog as a backup. And for the record, I have been involved in the PG cataloging effort for more than six years and anyone who says I am not interested in it any more is clearly not aware of the full facts. It may be quite disappointing when one's years of volunteer efforts have been deleted with the "new improvements"! Alev. an "official" librarian
Importing other people's MARC into our database will be much hairier.
-- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
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