On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 09:43:05AM -1000, Karen Lofstrom wrote:
From my USER point of view, PG gives next to no usable information to
... 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.)
This approach would be problematic, since the PG titles are considered as published when *we* release them. Published in Urbana, Illinois. Published by Project Gutenberg. It might be desirable to include something about original publication dates of the source material(s) we used, but I think that's not consistent with (say) Dublin Core metadata for our books. I believe you'll find that cataloging rules for reprints and derivatives are to catalog the reprint or derivative, not the original item. (We see this all the time with facsimile reprints, in fact.) In case you are thinking, "but what if we try to accurately represent the old printed book, in our new eBook," it's still not appropriate to claim that the old book's metata applies to our new eBook. Furthermore, we'll have scholars and other riffraff complaining that our book is not, in fact, the same.
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.
We do reasonably well with this, but would use more. We use LCSH. It's not in the book, but is in the RDF in the cache/generated subset (see my earlier notes on this) , and of course in our catalog (i.e., the XML/RDF or MARC in "offline catalogs").
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.)
Well, that's in there. Original is in the book, and the metadata. Updates are in the book. Your suggestions are all good ones, and I'm only providing feedback on the few where you might have some misunderstandings. -- Greg
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 _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d