Ok, more clarification then. I'm not talking about trying to make something which strives towards the ideals of traditional library cataloging. Personally, I do not believe that that could happen with a group of volunteers. Please notice that the subject heading used for this discussion uses the word "Categorizing", not "cataloging". I am interested in, as you suggest below, creating broader catagories. And yes, I am also aware of many sources we could look to for some ideas. Probably the most productive would be taking a look at places that have reformatted PG texts and presented them anew, such as Blackmask, or Samizdat. Andrew On Mon, 10 Jul 2006 Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
again, i suggested a wiki for _coordination_, not for cataloging per se. there's a whole lot of coordination that needs to be done before you can even begin the cataloging.
but having said that, i would agree with joey that it wouldn't be elegant or scalable to have a wiki-page for each book, and i don't think anyone would even suggest that for "a catalog".
(you might want to have a separate wiki-page for each book for _discussion_ about that book, but that would be an entirely different animal.)
i'd suggest a wiki-page for each "big category" -- e.g., reference, fiction, nonfiction, serials -- with a list of e-book numbers and titles in each.
when a page gets too big, split it into sub-pages depending on what kind of split of it makes sense. (that's assuming that a split _does_ make sense.)
but again, much of the thought-work on this has already been done previously on this very listserve, so someone should first recover all of that work instead of doing it all over again from scratch...
further, it should be possible to leverage some of the work that greg just did in creating the d.v.d.
for instance, i draw your attention to the files here:
there are amazon pages for the penguin classics library; one list is sorted by title, the other list is sorted by author. although the book-links on these copied pages don't work, if you go to the current amazon pages, the links will work.
those individual-book pages could be quite useful to you. for instance, the one for "around the world in 80 days" has:
Subjects
Literature & Fiction > General > Classics Literature & Fiction > World Literature > British > 19th Century Literature & Fiction > World Literature > French
Look for similar items by subject Classics Fiction French Novel And Short Story Literature - Classics / Criticism Literature: Classics Voyages around the world 19th century fiction Classic fiction Fiction / Classics French
if you were to scrape the amazon page for every e-text that p.g. has, you'd end up with a lot of information to help you create a catalog...
perhaps the first thing you need to do is make a skeleton of exactly how you want your catalog to look, and how you want it to behave...
-bowerbird