I'll add a bit of information to Ben's note, mainly because I was
involved with the OL during its development so I sometimes have
background information on WHY things turned out the way they did.
Putting this in email is a lazy way for me to document some things that
may not be known to others.
Because a large number of the records in the database came from US
library cataloging (especially from the Library of Congress), the
concept of "genre" is often the fairly narrow one that such libraries
recognize. (The use of this may expand in the future, as new cataloging
rules are more open to genre information.)
Where "genre" was included in the records, it was as one segment of a
subject heading:
English language -- Dictionaries
This become two subject headings: English language, and Dictionaries
Subjects may also cover the literary genre, like "Mysteries," but
libraries only include this information in limited circumstances.
Many records also came from Amazon, but it looks to me (and I don't
recall exactly) that the BISAC subject headings were not included in OL.
Those are the subject headings that bookstores use, and they are kind of
a combination of topic ("Mathematics") and genre ("Mysteries," "Romance").
It would be great to have more genre information. We'd need to decide
whether to add that information to subjects, or to create a separate
data element. At the time that Open Library was being developed the
general feeling was that there are many different concepts of genre that
a separate data element would just confuse editors. Adding them to
subjects may be sufficient.
kc
On 10/13/13 9:00 AM, Ben Companjen wrote:
> Hi Stefan,
>
> Comments are inline.
>
> On 10 October 2013 20:51, Stefan Wurzinger
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi guys,
>
> ... and girls ;)
>
>>
>> thank you again for your help, I'm really happy about it!
>> I have another question and I hope it's the last one :)
>
> I hope it isn't your last question, but I do hope I can answer your
> question. We are mostly people who are users, just like you. A couple
> of people have (had) stronger ties with the Open Library, but the rest
> is just interested in OL's technical stuff.
>
>>
>> Is there any information about the genre of a book?
>> I saw that there is many information about a book like author, pages,
>> publisher, weight etc. but I didn't found the genre. Is there such an
>> information?
>
> No, there is no globally defined set of genres for all books in OL.
> However, some 1.3 million editions (of ~25 million in total) have a
> "genres" field, which is displayed, but cannot be edited via the web
> interface. I think "novel", "dictionary" are values used in this
> field.
>
> Possible more useful, although different from what you probably call
> "genre", are the classifications and subjects. Since a lot of data
> came from libraries, the books may have a classification from the
> Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal Classification scheme. These
> schemes (see [1] and [2]) have classes for reference works, literature
> and other types of works by general topic.
> Subject in OL are freeform: next to the topics of works
> (classifications are - strangely enough - assigned to Ediitions,
> subjects to Works), these are used to indicate e.g. availability for
> loan. There are works with subjects "dictionary" or "novel", although
> they are few.
>
> Did this help? :)
>
> Regards,
>
> Ben
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_Classification
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification
>>
>> Best regards and thanks in advance
>> Stefan Wurzinger
>>
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--
Karen Coyle
[email protected] http://kcoyle.net
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
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