I think WorldCat is the best bet, see below.
From: elibrar...@hotmail.com To: jakob.v...@gbv.de Subject: RE: Finding all the Perl books Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2011 07:50:32 -0600 Go to WorldCat.org and search under the subject heading Perl (Computer program language) Perl (Langage de programmation) etc. If you do a book search on Perl, click on one of the results and look to the right to get to the subject headings--click on that and you will only get relevant titles. WorldCat contains the Library of Congress and the bibliographic records of thousands of libraries around the world, but (ideally) without all the duplication. It will at least provide a list of all of the Perl books ever acquired by a library. Emily ---------------------------------------- > Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2011 09:18:49 +0100 > From: jakob.v...@gbv.de > To: perl4lib@perl.org > Subject: Re: Finding all the Perl books > > brian d foy asked: > > > I'm looking for a way to discover all the books ever published about > > Perl. Where should I look? > > Unless someone else has already created a bibliography of Perl books, > you will find almost all books in library catalogs - except some edge > cases > that depend on what "published" means. Probably there are some printed > Perl tutorials distributed by hand, that never made it into libraries, > and > the definition of e-Book is rather fuzzy. I bet you mean traditional > printed > books, right? > > So the tricky part is to find the right library catalogs and how to best > query > them. You wrote: > > > Is there a Perl interface for the WorldCat APIs? If not, I'll make > > one. Are people merely shoving their results into something like > > XML::Feed? I have a big dump of data > > The most-popular search APIs for library catalogs are Z39.50 which is > now > replaced by SRU > > http://search.cpan.org/dist/SRU/ > http://search.cpan.org/dist/Net-Z3950-ZOOM/ > > I guess you know http://www.oclc.org/developer/services/WCAPI > > > WorldCat has many of the books, but there are holes. I realize that > > this is a union catalog instead of a historical database. > > Perl is very old, but not old enough to show up in historical databases > ;-) > WorldCat is the largest but not the only union catalog, especially if > you > search for non-English books. > > > I have the data dump from Google Books already. > > Where did you get this? > > > I figure that the Library of Congress knows about a lot of them, but > > I don't have $20,000 to buy their 2012 database (or subsequent ones). > > Does someone at this list know whether all of LoC goes into WorldCat? > > In theory this query is a good use-case for Linked Data, but then you > will > have to wait some other 10 years. However libraries already use > controlled > vocabularies since centuries, so there are some subject headings for > Perl. > I only looked in the German national library: > > http://d-nb.info/gnd/4709495-3 Perl 6 > http://d-nb.info/gnd/7638891-8 Perl 5.10 > http://d-nb.info/gnd/4698927-4 Perl 5.8 > http://d-nb.info/gnd/4698920-1 Perl 5.6.1 > http://d-nb.info/gnd/4646656-3 Perl 5.6 > http://d-nb.info/gnd/4419978-8 Perl 5 > http://d-nb.info/gnd/4625418-3 mod_perl > http://d-nb.info/gnd/4584437-9 Perl DBI > http://d-nb.info/gnd/4307836-9 Perl in general > > The list of publications for each subject heading are available as RSS. > > Subject headings are important because the term "Perl" is used in other > context too. For instance there is a German town of this name > > http://d-nb.info/gnd/4102974-4 = > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl,_Saarland > > Having said this, full text search is the best method to start with. A > good > place to find libraries is > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources > > Many library catalogs are subsumed by union catalogs, so you don't need > to query each of them. > > The best collection not created by libraries is LibraryThing, which is > created by volunteers and provided good APIs too, see: > > http://www.librarything.com/tag/perl > > Perhaps the best method is crowd-sourcing the LibraryThing way. > > Sorry for not giving a simple answer. I doubt that you can find all Perl > books > in all languages fully automatically. > > Cheers > Jakob > > -- > brian d foy > > > -- > Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) > Digitale Bibliothek - Jakob Voß > Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1 > 37073 Goettingen - Germany > +49 (0)551 39-10242 > http://www.gbv.de > jakob.v...@gbv.de
