Hello. I am a librarian, and this is a swell idea. Here are answers to your questions:
>Is there any cataloguing information for the Debian CD collections >(past or present) available? Yes. The cds themselves have the needed information in (or on) them. What other information is needed can be easily found at the Debian wesite. To make the gathering of this information easier on the cataloguer, I highly recommend donating to the library an official Debian cdrom set (http://www.debian.org/CD/vendors/). In addition to making the cataloguer's job a little easier, the sight of official cds should help ease fears the librarians may have of adding (what we know but they probably don't know isn't) bootlegged software to their collection. >How does one go about generating that sort of >information, or do libraries do the job themselves? In a good chunk of the English-speaking world the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (read its exciting history here: http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/jsc/history.html) governs the gathering and presenting of this information. It is a rather detailed process, and there are heaps of librarians (the above mentioned cataloguers) who specialize in it. I hope this helps. cheers -aaron ---- cc me when replying to this, please
