I'm new around here so please forgive me if I go over old ground. I have subscribed to the RSS Recently Posted or Updated feeds and it is truely amazing to see the way the entries roll in every night. However, it is frustrating to see when one of the entries is opened up there is little information apart from the author (with or without dates) and a title. In most cases I have no idea what the book is about and whether I am interested in it. I, and I am sure many others would love to see a bit more detail such as the original date of publication and a brief synopsis of the work. Obviously to enter such information day after day with such a rush of material is far beyond the resources of a small group of volunteers, however, dedicated. Would it not be possible to devise a distributed cataloguing system followng along the model of DP. For each book "in the frame" a form would be provided with spaces for the required items. When these were completed (and checked) the data would then be transferred, in an agreed format--MARC or otherwise,--to a file held within the books directory tree. In many cases this information is provided at the time of proofreadng and then it seems to be lost. Obviously some of the infomation might be easy to complete such as book or serial. However other fields might need research such as key dates, author bio etc. Also a meaningful synopsis would mean most likely reading the text or abstracting a portion from another work. I could also see that multilingual versions might be needed. I would think there are many who would rise to the challenge of helping in such an endevour, Lynne On Tuesday 09 November 2004 12:26 pm, Alev Akman wrote:
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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