Ben, if it's any consolation, libraries basically gave up on describing "book" and instead refer to "textual material." Textual material can be monographic or serial, and of any length. The difference between a book and a pamphlet are not recognized -- although there is some assumption that pages are held together in both. Loose sheets of text are usually in the nature of manuscripts. But there are to hard rules.
The e-document development really made any definition of book just about impossible. There's text, but no pages, no binding. There are spam records on OL for obvious non-books, but I would bet that some of the items for non-books have come in from Amazon. There *is* as TomM says, a practice of adding ISBNs for just about anything you can sell. I find it interesting that folks like Google and the Archive zeroed in on books when they thought about libraries, since libraries actually have so much more. However, when you see how badly Google as handled the digitization of journals, maybe it's just as well. kc On 3/17/13 5:58 PM, Ben Companjen wrote: > (continued from another discussion on ol-tech) > > It's not an extensive discussion of every aspect of books, but I > started (and for now, finished) a use case for Open Library: how I > would like to use it for cataloguing (my) books. I put it on the wiki > in a subpage of my profile: > http://openlibrary.org/people/bencompanjen/cataloguing (it is a wiki, > although if you can edit that page, you're either me or an admin). > > There is a short bit in it about the boundaries among editions, but > assumes the definition of a book is understood (or perhaps: defined) > by the reader. As far as I know, Open Library has never had a clear > definition of book, let alone a strict enforcement of a definition. > The web interface of course shows OL's expectation of what aspects of > books can be described, but that hasn't stopped people from entering > shoes, pills, and err, no wait... ;) > On a more serious note, I've seen a lot more than the traditional > books (judging by the format): audio and video recordings, brochures, > objects and artefacts etc. Not books per se, but things you do find in > libraries. > > Every definition that crosses my mind at this moment is at best > incomplete, so I won't write any here. I'd say: if you think your > thing is a book, that's fine with me (N.B.: you don't need my approval > :D). Also, if it doesn't perfectly fit the edit form in the way you > want, explain it in the notes. > For my use case a partial description is fine if you can tell one > edition from another. > > There must have been good discussions on this topic before, but I was > too lazy to search the archives [1, 2] myself. > > Ben > > [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-tech@archive.org/ > [2] http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ > > On 17 March 2013 14:28, Tom Morris <tfmor...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 6:32 AM, Karl Eichwalder <k...@gnu.franken.de> wrote: >>> >>> Lee Passey <l...@novomail.net> writes: >>> >>>> Right now, it appears to me that Open Book Catalog is lacking a vision >>>> and a visionary. Even the platitude "one web page for every book" is so >>>> broad as to be essentially meaningless. That is what we already have, so >>>> what's missing? >>> >>> Unfortunately, that's not the truth. Series, Volumes of the Works of an >>> author, and Monographs are often deliberately mixed. And then, there >>> are translations of the "book". And digital faksimiles and digital >>> reprints (such as proofed book by the distributed proofreaders and >>> gutenberg.org). >>> >>> We have one web page per book, but it is undefined what a book actually >>> is. For serious work the data we have is useless. And it looks >>> impossible to do cleanups. With every "import" it gets worse. >>> >>>> The data may be incomplete, it may be unreliable, it may be unreusable >>>> for legal reasons, it may be unreusable for technical reasons, and it >>>> may not lead to any actual content, but hey, there /is/ one web page >>>> for every book! >>> >>> Yes, but what's a book? >> >> >> That doesn't tell us anything about how you'd like "book" to be defined, >> what type of data would be useful to you or what your use case is. Why >> don't you join the thread on ol-discuss and let us know what SUSE would like >> from OpenLibrary. >> >> Tom >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Ol-tech mailing list >> ol-t...@archive.org >> http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech >> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to >> ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org >> > _______________________________________________ > Ol-discuss mailing list > Ol-discuss@archive.org > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org > -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list Ol-discuss@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org
