On 02/09/2012 08:43 PM, 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.
The database can hold all that data. Do you volunteer to enter them? No, eh?
(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.)
Do enter *Berlin 1922* into the PG search.
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.
Do enter *99004276* into the PG search.
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.)
That is why I'm proposing a source repository. You can get all that plus see which lines were corrected.
Finally, I'd want a recommendation system like the ones used by Amazon or Netflix.
We have a light-weight recommendation system based on book downloads only. If you want a better one, then PG must keep a lot of personal data about you. That is something I want to avoid.
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.
If you show me how to start multiple downloads on all browsers I'll do it.
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.
People went to the moon, why don't we? It's just a matter of ... -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org