On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 10:38 PM, Tom Morris <[email protected]> wrote:
> I think most of them are cataloged.

Actually, let me restate that.  I think most of the printed editions
from which the Project Gutenberg were transcribed have been cataloged,
but the transcriptions should probably (certainly?) be considered
editions in their own right.

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 7:07 PM, George Oates <[email protected]> wrote:

> We went through the process of ingesting all of PG earlier this year, into
> Internet Archive:
>
> http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Agutenberg
>
> But, we haven't connected those to OL, yet.

I'm not sure it's as simple a matter as just "connecting" because the
PG metadata is often pretty sparse, so to do a halfway decent job of
cataloging, you'd probably need to manually read the title page of the
text (if present in the transcription) and extract publication dates &
places, etc.  In earlier transcriptions, I think PG explicitly left
out edition info, so there'd be no way to tie the e-text back to the
original printed edition at all.

If you look at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31061.rdf, all it
contains is the author, the title, and a statement that the work is
"public domain" -- no copyright dates, publication dates, etc, so
there's no automated way to tell that it's this edition
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL14801590M/A_history_of_mathematics.
that PG transcribed.  You'd also need to figure out which of the works
to connect to 
http://openlibrary.org/search?q=a+history+of+mathematics&author_key=OL316652A

An additional complication is that, rather ironically, Project
Gutenberg is claiming copyright on the bibliographic data they do have
and only license it under GPL which isn't compatible with
OpenLibrary's licensing.  I have a hard time seeing them winning the
argument that a book's title and author are copyrightable facts, but
stranger things have happened.

I think it'd be great to see this happen, but I suspect it'll be a
non-trivial task.

Tom
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