At 08:06 PM 11/9/2004 +0100, you wrote:
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.
Hello list. Sorry if I seem to be complaining, but I must say that I find the current PG catalog to be mostly useless. I should qualify that. I can easily search through GUTINDEX.ALL to find a certain title or author. I've found that grep works great for that. However, there are no clues anywhere that tell me what a book is about, whether it's mystery, drama, nonfiction or something else, or even a basic subject classification. I admit that some of this might be found by using the search form or the gutenberg.org/etext1234 url, but from the standpoint of a user who is in a hurry and just wants something to read it's still inconvenient. Let's pick a random example of something which has been recently discussed. http://gutenberg.org/etext/1473 First, the link for in-depth information takes you to the volunteer pages. This is misleading since it looks like I would be able to find more information on the book. More than once I have followed that link only to find myself in the wrong place and I had to go back in my browser. 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. I have a possible suggestion for solving part of this. Put something in the newsletter asking people who read PG etexts to write summaries of them and categorize them. Somehow create a form which only allows books to be reviewed or summarized, maybe like a wiki but more confined. Someone would still manually approve the summary ("good" isn't helpful) and add it to the catalog. That would at least give the end user some idea of what a book is about first. Just for clarity, I would suggest that this summary, synopsis, categorization etc. would show up on the etext/1234 page and be added to the rdf feed but not appear in GUTINDEX.ALL.