Book People Archive

How to improve coverage of your Essential Topic (was: Please share...)

Bowerbird rants in a familiar-sounding key:

> why are u.s. social scientists studying such arcane topics,
> when a full-scale analysis of the corruption of our own
> political and economic systems, as well as our imperialism
> and global war-making actions, is so much more important?

Which is a theme that folks who've spent much time around universities
or libraries should be used to seeing: Why are precious resources being
spent on Trivial (or, in some variants, Offensive) Topics, when they
should concentrate on The Essential Topic?

For The Essential Topic, depending on the time, place, and people, you can
fill in things like "the war in Vietnam", "the breakdown of standards", "the
imminent threat to this country", "the imminent threat to life on Earth",
"the development of space" (a topic that some give the Trivial Topic slot,
and others the Essential Topic slot), "the hidden forces behind society
as we know it", or "my favored source of Revelation", among other
popular choices.

Librarians have a somewhat mixed reaction to this sort of argument.  When it's
coming from someone in a governmental body or interest group that threatens to
wield economic or political power to stop libraries from acquiring, or
readers from studying, Unfavored Materials, they get kind of nervous.
But in the more common case, it's coming from someone who simply cares
a lot about The Essential Topic, and wants other people to know more
about it too.

Locally, those are folks that library people should *want* to hear from, at
least if those folks also have useful knowledge and a willingness and ability
to share it in manageable ways.  Because they're the folks who can tip you
off about topics your readership finds important, and help you find
significant resources on those topics.

I hear from enough people in the inbox for The Online Books Page, for
instance, that I have a pretty good sense of many of the topics that interest
my readers.  And I try to take advantage of that, not just by acting on
what they tell me directly, but on what is implied by what they tell me.
So, when I get a broken link report, I not only try to fix it, and spot-check
other links I might have to the same site, but I also check to see what the
book the person was looking for was about.  And then, if I have time,
I try to enhance the subject cataloging not only for that title, but for
similar titles.  I do the same thing with new title suggestions as time
permits.  If there are particular topics that get recurrent interest, I might
look around for other titles in that subject area, to enhance the quality,
diversity, or timeliness of the set of books offered on the topic.

For instance, lately I've been quietly upgrading the descriptive metadata
on a number of topics that appear to be of widespread current interest.
Do a subject browse under "Climatic changes" today, for instance, and you
should see a lot more material on climate change and global warming
clustered together there than you would have a few weeks ago.  And in
that case, it's largely due to adding subject terms to existing listings,
not so much in adding new listings.  But I'm happy to get those too.

Although I remain farther behind on listings than I'd like to be, I still
very much like to hear from folks who want to have improved coverage
on issues they care about.  I'm happy to hear about new online books,
or major archives and indexes; and I'm also happy to fill in detailed
LCSH subject indexing for books and topics that don't yet have it.
(Eventually we may also support more free-form dscriptions like
user-supplied tags, but that's still some ways off at best.)  If you're
interested, here are some practical tips:

   -- Be aware of what types of materials get indexed on The Online Books
      Page, and what don't.  In particular, we want complete free books online,
      in standard formats, with no copyright problems, that have been picked
      up by at least one major library.  At present we limit listings to
      English, due to limited resources, but that might not always be the case.

   -- Full title and author information, as well as URLs, can speed
      up listings.  If there's a persistent or stable URI to use,
      that's typically the one I prefer. 

   -- Keeping the number of items for me to consider in any given message
      to a manageable number (say, 12 or less) makes me more likely to
      deal with the message expeditiously, instead of putting it off till
      later or putting it into a "come back to when I can do bulk loading"
      folder.  Yes, I know, there are important collections I haven't gotten
      to that have way more than that many items.  But if I have to manually
      list items (which I do at present) it's often easier for me to deal
      with a few at a time.  Plus, if I know that the items you've picked out
      are the ones that are especially significant in that collection,
      that can be very helpful to know (and to share with other readers early).

   -- If the copyright status on a given item is questionable, it helps a lot
      if either you or the site where the item is hosted gives explicit
      information showing that it's either out of copyright or online with
      permission.  Otherwise, I'm likely to skip it if I'm pressed for
      time (which I often am), since it takes me a fair bit of effort to
      clear copyright myself.

   -- If you're giving subject cataloging terms, giving me some idea
      of where they came from might be helpful.  You don't have to give
      such terms, but if you have them, and they're from a suitably
      authority-controlled source, they might speed up the listing process.

   -- On the other hand, if you *don't* find a subject term, or a relationship
      between subject terms, that you would expect to find in my listing,
      I'd like to know about that too.  My catalog aims to bring together
      books on subject terms that people actually look up, not just on the
      terms that librarians think up.  (For instance, who had the idea
      of using "Climatic changes" instead of "Climate change"?)  We have
      the ability to dynamically add new aliases and subject relationships
      between controlled-vocabulary terms as they seem appropriate.
      (Penn will also soon be getting a fresh batch of subject authority
       records from the Library of Congress, which should also add many
       more appropriate aliases, relationships, and updates.)

   -- Be patient.  My current book-inbox queue goes back nearly 3 months at
      present.  I'm hoping to bring that down significantly before long, but
      that's how things stand now.  (Broken link reports get acted on faster
      than new listings suggestions, and usually get fixed or flagged within
      one business day.) You can occasionally email me again if you want to
      know if I got your earlier suggestions, or you want to add new ones.
      (When someone's submission reaches the front of the queue, I'll often
      also check for other submissions that person's made since then.)

Thanks to all to your help on getting Essential Knowledge out to the world!

John Mark Ockerbloom
Editor, The Online Books Page
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/