so, did anything get done on this matter on this round of the merry-go-round? -bowerbird p.s. nice summary, john... ----------------------------------------------- j.hagerson said: We have the classic PG conundrum: In response to a suggestion to make a change, someone helpfully (sarcasm, people!) indicates the enormity of the task and asks if the person making the suggestion is willing to single-handedly implement it or to raise tens of thousands of dollars to hire one or more professionals to "do it right." Another responds with a willingness to participate in an aspect of the solution, but only after someone else gets the ball rolling. Another person reminds us that Distributed Proofreaders has already collected the data to provide a partial solution; we only need to create a mechanism to bring their data over to the "parent" site. Finally, someone pipes up that some material provided to DP is so rare that the only records of the material even being created are buried with some defrocked monk who drowned off the coast of Antigua under mysterious circumstances. And someone else will contribute yet another dead horse for us to beat. Come on, people. There is no magic wand to provide a complete instant solution to this issue. There is also nothing wrong for multiple partial solutions. If someone is really excited about petunias, let that person create a petunia page. If the LOC has an official subject category for petunias (I don't know, Science - Botany - Perennial Plants - North America - Petunias), then let's link things that way too. We have Distributed Proofreaders. Do we need Distributed Catalogers? I would be willing to read a book and tell you what categories would be significant to me. I am not a professional cataloger, but I have used a library before and I have some concept of a subject index. The original post was along the lines of "it would be nice if we could do this." Yes, lots of things would be nice and not every nice thing deserves to be done. However, if we fancy ourselves as a library, is not a subject index part of the catalog? Let the flames begin.