On 19 August 2011 17:59, Charles Matthews <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hang on - much as I love the DNB, there is huge amount to know before > saying spending money on it would be a good use. There are literally > hundreds of Google Books keys for DNB volumes, some of which don't work > in the UK but do work in the USA, etc. To quickly follow up, there's also the complicating factor that not all DNB articles are public domain - at least, not outside the US, which isn't an issue for WM proper but is for us! Almost everything in the 1885 publication is *likely* to be PD - unless the contributors were very precocious junior academics - but the DNB included more recent content (supplementary volumes published every ten years or so) and those are a real minefield involving individual author dates. OED do have the metadata to figure this out on a life+70 basis, but it might not be trivial for them. (It's also not clear if the versions published on the ODNB website are themselves the "clean" versions - they may have been tidied up, etc, which muddies the waters a little.) Do we have a central list of DNB volumes for which WS does not have scans? I'm happy to spend an hour digging through Google Books / OL / etc... -- - Andrew Gray [email protected] _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list [email protected] http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
