Re: [gutvol-d] [BP] The Future of eBooks
Marcello Perathoner writes:
The design philosophy of the catalog database is:
To help people find a book they may want to read.
It does a pretty horrid job at that, then. If you don't know what you're looking for, it's very hard to find it. One step might be making the list of LoC classifications available, so you can scroll down to the list of histories. When I'm looking for something to read, I often look for a list of science-fiction or mysteries. Being in a college library, I miss the spine stickers loudly identifying the genre of the fiction. PG's catalog has nothing in that direction. Another thing I will do is to browse the stacks. I guess if the LoC classifications are available, that would be possible. The thing I would honestly like is the Amazon-style "if you liked this, you might like ...". I don't mean to be harsh in this email, but I'm having a real hard time believing your statement, because the catalog so badly sucks at it. Not that most of the library catalogs I've dealt with have been good at it, but it's never been stated as a design philosophy for them. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm
On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, D. Starner wrote:
When I'm looking for something to read, I often look for a list of science-fiction or mysteries. Being in a college library, I miss the spine stickers loudly identifying the genre of the fiction. PG's catalog has nothing in that direction.
If it helps, I've assembled a small list of PG books that would fall under the heading of science fiction. I haven't done anything with it yet, as I feel it's rather on the small side, and surely misses many of the examples which we have. Another catagory that could be of interest to some is cook books, of which there are now quite a decent number in PG. Andrew
Andrew Sly wrote:
If it helps, I've assembled a small list of PG books that would fall under the heading of science fiction. I haven't done anything with it yet, as I feel it's rather on the small side, and surely misses many of the examples which we have.
Another catagory that could be of interest to some is cook books, of which there are now quite a decent number in PG.
You could add a subject "Science Fiction" or "Cooking" entry to all those books. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
Marcello Perathoner wrote:
Andrew Sly wrote:
If it helps, I've assembled a small list of PG books that would fall under the heading of science fiction. I haven't done anything with it yet, as I feel it's rather on the small side, and surely misses many of the examples which we have.
Another catagory that could be of interest to some is cook books, of which there are now quite a decent number in PG.
You could add a subject "Science Fiction" or "Cooking" entry to all those books.
Is there a simple process for doing this? For historical novels, there's a book in PG, "A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales" (#1359) which lists hundreds of such, also listing their time and place settings: an ever-increasing number of the titles are in PG, so it would make an interesting project for someone with write access to the catalog data to go through the listing and add this classification to those titles. At present, there are only six titles in the catalog categorised as historical fiction. Distributed Proofreaders projects are classified under various headings (history, cooking, children's etc. ) when they're first started: it may be worth working out with DP a way of passing that data on to the catalog when the work is submitted. That only covers DP books, and probably doesn't match proper library classifications, but it should help in giving some information to the prospective reader.
Malcolm Farmer wrote:
You could add a subject "Science Fiction" or "Cooking" entry to all those books.
Is there a simple process for doing this?
First you have to agree with Andrew on the subject headings you want to tackle. Then you can build an ASCII-list like this: Subject: Cooking 1234 2345 3456 Subject: Science Fiction 7777 8888 9999 The numbers are the etext numbers. I will then import that data into the database. That's the easiest way to get a *lot* of data into the catalog. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
Marcello Perathoner wrote:
Malcolm Farmer wrote:
You could add a subject "Science Fiction" or "Cooking" entry to all those books.
Is there a simple process for doing this?
First you have to agree with Andrew on the subject headings you want to tackle. Then you can build an ASCII-list like this:
Subject: Cooking 1234 2345 3456 [snip] The numbers are the etext numbers. I will then import that data into the database. That's the easiest way to get a *lot* of data into the catalog.
Oh, right then. It really *is* simple. In that case I'd be happy to volunteer to look up the numbers for the historical fiction texts listed in the bibliography I mentioned. That won't cover every book in this category (post-1900 works, for example, will be missing), but it should considerably expand that category's listing.
D. Starner wrote:
It does a pretty horrid job at that, then. If you don't know what you're looking for, it's very hard to find it. One step might be making the list of LoC classifications available, so you can scroll down to the list of histories.
We already have LoC class as a search criterium. What we lack is the data. Are you volunteering to type the data in ? -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
participants (4)
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Andrew Sly -
D. Starner -
Malcolm Farmer -
Marcello Perathoner