(continued from another discussion on ol-tech) It's not an extensive discussion of every aspect of books, but I started (and for now, finished) a use case for Open Library: how I would like to use it for cataloguing (my) books. I put it on the wiki in a subpage of my profile: http://openlibrary.org/people/bencompanjen/cataloguing (it is a wiki, although if you can edit that page, you're either me or an admin).
There is a short bit in it about the boundaries among editions, but assumes the definition of a book is understood (or perhaps: defined) by the reader. As far as I know, Open Library has never had a clear definition of book, let alone a strict enforcement of a definition. The web interface of course shows OL's expectation of what aspects of books can be described, but that hasn't stopped people from entering shoes, pills, and err, no wait... ;) On a more serious note, I've seen a lot more than the traditional books (judging by the format): audio and video recordings, brochures, objects and artefacts etc. Not books per se, but things you do find in libraries. Every definition that crosses my mind at this moment is at best incomplete, so I won't write any here. I'd say: if you think your thing is a book, that's fine with me (N.B.: you don't need my approval :D). Also, if it doesn't perfectly fit the edit form in the way you want, explain it in the notes. For my use case a partial description is fine if you can tell one edition from another. There must have been good discussions on this topic before, but I was too lazy to search the archives [1, 2] myself. Ben [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-tech@archive.org/ [2] http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ On 17 March 2013 14:28, Tom Morris <tfmor...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 6:32 AM, Karl Eichwalder <k...@gnu.franken.de> wrote: >> >> Lee Passey <l...@novomail.net> writes: >> >> > Right now, it appears to me that Open Book Catalog is lacking a vision >> > and a visionary. Even the platitude "one web page for every book" is so >> > broad as to be essentially meaningless. That is what we already have, so >> > what's missing? >> >> Unfortunately, that's not the truth. Series, Volumes of the Works of an >> author, and Monographs are often deliberately mixed. And then, there >> are translations of the "book". And digital faksimiles and digital >> reprints (such as proofed book by the distributed proofreaders and >> gutenberg.org). >> >> We have one web page per book, but it is undefined what a book actually >> is. For serious work the data we have is useless. And it looks >> impossible to do cleanups. With every "import" it gets worse. >> >> > The data may be incomplete, it may be unreliable, it may be unreusable >> > for legal reasons, it may be unreusable for technical reasons, and it >> > may not lead to any actual content, but hey, there /is/ one web page >> > for every book! >> >> Yes, but what's a book? > > > That doesn't tell us anything about how you'd like "book" to be defined, > what type of data would be useful to you or what your use case is. Why > don't you join the thread on ol-discuss and let us know what SUSE would like > from OpenLibrary. > > Tom > > _______________________________________________ > Ol-tech mailing list > ol-t...@archive.org > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org > _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list Ol-discuss@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org
