Re: Finding all the Perl books
Interesting question. First, on the Library of Congress data, Internet Archive has a snapshot of the LoC information from 2007. It was collected by the Scriblio project http://www.archive.org/details/marc_records_scriblio_net. There's also some other record collections at archive that contain MARC records. There's some good MARC libraries in Perl. As you point out though, looking at library catalogs is going to produce a lot of holes. You might have better luck looking at some of the larger publishers. They might have ONIX files they can share with you, but the data harvesting with publishers typically isn't easy to do in an automatic way. The publishers generally don't seem to make that data available, which is a pity. But I suspect contacting them asking for ONIX dumps of their catalogs might be one of the quicker routes, particularly for historical information. One nice advantage with Perl is most of the books will have an isbn number, which will help with combining data from multiple sources. Another old-school, non-automated way technique to do this would be to follow citation trails. Use something like Web of Science. Of course, the issue there is that many of the citation sources will be academic and there will be holes for publishers like Sams that are more focused on developers. ACM Digital Library also does this to a degree if I remember correctly and they have non-ACM materials w/ record info. For example, the first hit is Perl Cookbook when I search there. Depending on the scope of the project or how urgent it is this might be a useful thing to crowd-source. Start gathering the data and make it available and ask people to send information about anything that is missing. One final question, do you want all books, published anywhere and each edition? So you want to know about, say, the Chinese translations to Effective Perl Programming and some small book only published in Sanskrit? Jon Gorman On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 1:18 PM, brian d foy brian.d@gmail.com wrote: I'm looking for a way to discover all the books ever published about Perl. Where should I look? * Is there a Perl interface for the WorldCat APIs? If not, I'll make one. Are people merely shoving their results into something like XML::Feed? I have a big dump of data * WorldCat has many of the books, but there are holes. I realize that this is a union catalog instead of a historical database. * I know about the Amazon interfaces too, but I think that's the same problem as WorldCat (and there are already Perl interfaces for that). * I have the data dump from Google Books already. * I figure that the Library of Congress knows about a lot of them, but I don't have $20,000 to buy their 2012 database (or subsequent ones). Is there some other way to get re -- brian d foy brian.d@gmail.com
FW: Finding all the Perl books
I think WorldCat is the best bet, see below. From: elibrar...@hotmail.com To: jakob.v...@gbv.de Subject: RE: Finding all the Perl books Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2011 07:50:32 -0600 Go to WorldCat.org and search under the subject heading Perl (Computer program language) Perl (Langage de programmation) etc. If you do a book search on Perl, click on one of the results and look to the right to get to the subject headings--click on that and you will only get relevant titles. WorldCat contains the Library of Congress and the bibliographic records of thousands of libraries around the world, but (ideally) without all the duplication. It will at least provide a list of all of the Perl books ever acquired by a library. Emily Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2011 09:18:49 +0100 From: jakob.v...@gbv.de To: perl4lib@perl.org Subject: Re: Finding all the Perl books brian d foy asked: I'm looking for a way to discover all the books ever published about Perl. Where should I look? Unless someone else has already created a bibliography of Perl books, you will find almost all books in library catalogs - except some edge cases that depend on what published means. Probably there are some printed Perl tutorials distributed by hand, that never made it into libraries, and the definition of e-Book is rather fuzzy. I bet you mean traditional printed books, right? So the tricky part is to find the right library catalogs and how to best query them. You wrote: Is there a Perl interface for the WorldCat APIs? If not, I'll make one. Are people merely shoving their results into something like XML::Feed? I have a big dump of data The most-popular search APIs for library catalogs are Z39.50 which is now replaced by SRU http://search.cpan.org/dist/SRU/ http://search.cpan.org/dist/Net-Z3950-ZOOM/ I guess you know http://www.oclc.org/developer/services/WCAPI WorldCat has many of the books, but there are holes. I realize that this is a union catalog instead of a historical database. Perl is very old, but not old enough to show up in historical databases ;-) WorldCat is the largest but not the only union catalog, especially if you search for non-English books. I have the data dump from Google Books already. Where did you get this? I figure that the Library of Congress knows about a lot of them, but I don't have $20,000 to buy their 2012 database (or subsequent ones). Does someone at this list know whether all of LoC goes into WorldCat? In theory this query is a good use-case for Linked Data, but then you will have to wait some other 10 years. However libraries already use controlled vocabularies since centuries, so there are some subject headings for Perl. I only looked in the German national library: http://d-nb.info/gnd/4709495-3 Perl 6 http://d-nb.info/gnd/7638891-8 Perl 5.10 http://d-nb.info/gnd/4698927-4 Perl 5.8 http://d-nb.info/gnd/4698920-1 Perl 5.6.1 http://d-nb.info/gnd/4646656-3 Perl 5.6 http://d-nb.info/gnd/4419978-8 Perl 5 http://d-nb.info/gnd/4625418-3 mod_perl http://d-nb.info/gnd/4584437-9 Perl DBI http://d-nb.info/gnd/4307836-9 Perl in general The list of publications for each subject heading are available as RSS. Subject headings are important because the term Perl is used in other context too. For instance there is a German town of this name http://d-nb.info/gnd/4102974-4 = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl,_Saarland Having said this, full text search is the best method to start with. A good place to find libraries is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources Many library catalogs are subsumed by union catalogs, so you don't need to query each of them. The best collection not created by libraries is LibraryThing, which is created by volunteers and provided good APIs too, see: http://www.librarything.com/tag/perl Perhaps the best method is crowd-sourcing the LibraryThing way. Sorry for not giving a simple answer. I doubt that you can find all Perl books in all languages fully automatically. Cheers Jakob -- brian d foy -- Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) Digitale Bibliothek - Jakob Voß Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1 37073 Goettingen - Germany +49 (0)551 39-10242 http://www.gbv.de jakob.v...@gbv.de
Re: Finding all the Perl books
On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 9:32 AM, Jon Gorman jonathan.gor...@gmail.com wrote: First, on the Library of Congress data, Internet Archive has a snapshot of the LoC information from 2007. It was collected by the Scriblio project http://www.archive.org/details/marc_records_scriblio_net. There's also some other record collections at archive that contain MARC records. There's some good MARC libraries in Perl. It's not widely known, but Internet Archive also subscribe to theweekly updates from LC (I believe back to the Scriblio purchase) andmake them available on the Web (god bless 'em): http://www.archive.org/details/marc_loc_updates I believe all LoC records are present in WorldCat, except for thecatalog records that aren't in electronic form :-) I seem to rememberthere was an impoverished search API that OCLC offers to the generalpublic, and that it's nice one is reserved for OCLC subscribers. Youcould use the SRU module with LC's SRU endpoint: http://z3950.loc.gov:7090/voyager?operation=explain But, depending on what you are doing, I would probably be content tosift through the 481 hits in GoogleBooks and call it a day :-) https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q=perl //Ed
