On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 05:44:37PM +0100, Marcello Perathoner wrote:
Tony Baechler wrote:
Second, let's look at the subject. All it says is "fiction." OK, but about what? What category of fiction? While bookshare.org has a catalog not designed for professionals either, most books have a synopsis and are sorted by category.
Everybody is complaining about the missing subject information.
Complaining won't help. Stepping up and volunteering to enter the data would help.
It's a little more complicated than that. I'll send a few messages more about this in a few minutes. The basic story is that the FIRST approach to cataloging our stuff will be "copy" cataloging. This includes adding subject terms, as well as regularizing the titles, authors and other data. This involves finding an existing catalog record in MARC format via OCLC or similar resources. Alev thinks this is possible for the majority of our works, even the very obscure ones and non-US items. The SECOND approach will be original cataloging, to create a record from scratch (or based on existing info like author records). This is something we'd like to do only when necessary. In either case, adding a new record requires looking at consistency with other records and other uses of the subject information, because these things tend to change over time. My view is that we will be able to get a corps of "distributed catalogers" to work on the first approach, though just as with distributed proofreaders, there will probably be different levels at which people feel comfortable/confident/competent in creating or changing records. ** I'll send some further info about how this could get underway. ** At some point soon, though, let's move this to the "gutcat" ** list. http://lists.pglaf.org to join -- Greg