brad said:

Are you kidding?

no. are you?

Check any of the major online catalogs. They all try to integrate records for electronic works.

yeah. but so what? i don't get the impression that the people who are looking for e-texts go to a library's catalog to try and find 'em...

The rows of wooden drawers with paper catalog cards are still there but most people use the computer catalog.

um, yes, i quite realize that. as far as i know, the "rows of wooden drawers" were effectively replaced a decade or more ago. they're still kind of quaint, though, don't you think? in spite of their digitized equivalents, however, google (and the others) are the new "card catalog". so i would think it would be _far_ more productive to implement a strategy that leverages the search engines (because, honestly, the system you have now does not), instead of plays into all of the antiquated systems. heck, i'd even like to see a decent system on the website. the one there now is good if you know the title and/or the author-name. that's a start. but it doesn't go very far, not in _recommending_ a book to a reader...

A growing number of brick and mortar libraries are now adding etexts to their collections. Sometimes they only provide links to websites but often they are local copies of the etexts which correspond to their catalog entry.

well, that's all very nice. and if they did all of the work to integrate this e-library into their system, i'd say "thanks". but i don't see much purpose in doing that work myself, not when a whole host of other capabilities would be _far_ more useful, in my eyes, like full-text search... if getting to the patrons of a specific brick-and-mortar library could _only_ be done by getting myself in that specific catalog, it might be a completely different story. but when those patrons can just as easily use their computer to find my e-texts in google as to find them in the library's catalog, i don't see much difference. besides, show me one good system -- from any library out there! -- that helps a person find a book that they will like. show me! please! i said it before, and i'll say it again. collaborative filtering does this. spend time _productively_, building a collaborative filtering system. people don't decide what to read based on the info in a marc record.

A remote library in northern India may not be able to afford the bandwidth to download PG texts. But they can provide access to a CDROM collection of the PG texts.

ok, except now you're talking about something different. putting a c.d. of the e-texts into a brick-and-mortar library -- or indeed, in every residence in india with a computer -- is a great idea. but that has little to do with marc records.

Librarians would love to be able to say "all copies have been checked out, but the etext is available in pdf, html and plain text"

you'd think so. but michael reports he has encountered resistance. say what you will, i don't think "the absence of marc records" is why. (and when librarians finally decide they _do_ want a copy of the c.d., an absence of those marc records will be of zero consequence to them.) nonetheless, i'm sure their intelligent patrons will be able to find a copy. online. using google. to download. and burn copies for their neighbors.

I'd like to hear one good reason why the catalog shouldn't be available in as many different formats as is needed for everyone to find and access PG texts?

the best reason of all is because no one seems to want to do the work. most of you say "it's a good idea" (although i haven't heard one single compelling reason _why_), but very few have done anything about it. (kudos to andrew. and what is his experience? "it's hard work!") now, what is your counterargument to that? yeah, that's what i thought. -bowerbird