Questions/clarifications in-line below: On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 8:04 AM, Anand Chitipothu <an...@archive.org> wrote: > > > My response is inline. > > Hi everyone, > > after a few weeks of OL editing, I encountered some problems regarding > consistency of the data I add to OL. Since I found no documentation about > this, here are my questions: > > 1. Are ISBNs integers or do I use the - signs as they are used in the > books themselves? > > It doesn't matter OL accepts both the forms. >
It's useful to have them in normalized form for searching, etc. Does OL convert on input to some standard (e.g. ISBN-13 without punctuation)? > > 2. What exactly am I supposed to write in the pagination field? > > > That is more librarian-ish thing. Usually it looks like "14, 129 p." - > indicating that 14 pages initially, usually with i, ii numbering and then > 129 pages. > You'll also see "xiv, 129p" for this case, where the format of the field matches the numbering in the book. > It is good enough to fill the number of pages field and leave out the > pagination field. > > > 3. How do I count pages? Only the pages of the story (for a novel) or the > first and last few also? > > Number of pages is total number of pages, as amazon.com counts it. > To clarify, in your example above, do you mean "129" for all numbered pages or "143" (14+129) to include preface, index, etc. > 4. Languages of books are given in English if I'm not mistaken. But how do > I enter city or country names? Munich vs. München. > > We don't have a clear policy on this. Most records have been imported from > various library catalogues, which were converting the names to latin using > some encoding. > > There are books some books in OL, entered by some users, with titles in > non-english and non-latin languages. > My interpretation of the question was that it was asking about the language (and place) fields themselves, not the language the title is written in. For example, is the language "Deutsch" or "German," and similarly for Munich vs München. Ideally, we'd like these to be language agnostic items that get mapped back to the user's language on input/output, but until we get to that point I'd suggest everything like this be entered in English to ease conversion later. > 5. Why is the city name sometimes in brackets? ex: [Paris] > > That is the legacy that we imported from various library catalogs. > Brackets typically mean information that was added by the cataloger which doesn't actually come from the volume. In this case, they apparently know it was published in Paris, despite the fact that the title page doesn't contain the word "Paris" anywhere on it. Tom
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