Here you potentially open up a can of worms.... When we can't even agree on how to deal with author names, adding a subject catalog and classification system on top of our database will cause even more controversy... I much favour to have a powerful search engine index our complete texts, and rely on that for research; but agree that a good subject catalogue can help in locating books on a certain subject, especially to help people who like to browse to find works... In this digital age, we can easily file books under any relevant subject at the same time (no physical volumes that can only stand in one place); so such things as Dewey or LoC carry historical load we don't need. We should go for a nice, multi-facetted, multi-entry classification system for our books, but developing adding that would be a tremendous lot of work... So you can have on title like Foreman's Philippine Islands, 3rd ed. appear under things like: Colonialism Early Twentieth century History Philippines Spanish-American War Etc. Jeroen. Dave Doty wrote:
While we're on the subject of catalog issues...
I noticed a while back that many of the books I was interested in were not always listed in the catalog subjects where they would be appropriate, or not put in appropriate subcategories. (For example, I'm a history buff, and many history texts are either not listed under history, or not listed under a subcategory of time, place, or event that would be useful to searchers.)
Is there a way that we can add subjects to works and/or create new subject subcategories, or at least submit them for approval? Obviously, an attempt at a comprehensive subject system would be formidable if not impossible, but at least if volunteers/users can update individually, it can get more fleshed out.
I dug around the website, but if there's a discussion for this, I missed it.
Dave Doty
_______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d