Book People Archive

Re: General Message from Michael Hart

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006, Michael Hart wrote:

> Having said that, I should add that I said many times over years,
> and years, and years, that I am not a cataloger, and that it will
> be up to real catalogers to do that kind of work.
> 
> We have had several proposals, even from professional catalogers,
> but no one has paid any real attention to them.
> 
> As for Mr. Ockerbloom's LC listings, I think that is just great!
> 
> Making books is different from cataloging them.

This is so true, and the need for a good way of *finding* the digital 
books already out there, so great that I suggest that a Distributed 
Cataloguers might be just as useful as Distributed Scanners (another idea 
I like very much).

I would envision something like this: a site that maintains a large 
repository of links to the permanent locations of etexts.  Contributors 
could use an interactive interface to assist in building new, or 
contributing existing, MARC records and LoC classifications for the texts.  
The resulting metadata would be freely available -- and could easily be 
used in conjunction with free digital library software like Kona to allow 
for much easier browsing of the etext world.

I suppose the need for cataloguing can be disputed somewhat in the age of 
Google Books and full-text searches, but I would disagree.  When I'm in a 
brick-and-mortor library, I don't use the catalogue to find a particular 
book that I'm interested in, but the shelf that has the *subject* that I'm 
interested in.  Searching and browsing are very different functions, and 
while automatic categorization of texts based on their content is a field 
of active research in AI, it's not something ready for practical use by 
people wanting to find one book out of a mountain of them.

Any other thoughts on collaborative cataloguing out there?

--Mark