Re: Book tagging: Amazon and LibraryThing

From: Hahn, Harvey <hhahn_at_nyob>
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 15:49:14 -0600
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
|Hey, what's in "Book" in addition to "Fiction" and "Non-fiction" that
|you aren't showing us? Looks like it might be a bug of some kind.
|
|Total Book:            139410    216657    64.3
|FICTION TOTAL:    31948     39755    80.4
|NONFIC TOTAL:     83592    124348    67.2
|
|Does not add up.

No, it's not a bug.  Our 5-character positional item LOCATION codes (III
system) are just that: codes indicating the physical location in our
library, primarily for an upcoming use of displaying highlighted library
maps when a user clicks on some wording in the OPAC display (the codes
display an assigned text in our OPAC).  It's always possible things may
be changed or fine-tuned in the future (we completely overhauled our
LOCATION codes to this new system only a year ago), but many of the
codes are (deliberately) not as granularized or differentiated as the
ones I reported.  I thought Tim might be interested in as detailed a
breakdown as I could generate, and so that's why I showed only the data
I did (which did account for 75% of the books).  Going for this detail
also meant that 23870 matches in 52554 additional items were not
reported in my previous email (although I suppose a couple of these
categories could have been included).  Here's the breakdown of MOST of
those previously unreported data, per your request:

ESL:                424      2237    19.0
Genealogy:         1426      3431    41.6
Pbk "Hot Picks":    209       244    85.7
Large type:        2035      8514    23.9
Test prep:          200       715    28.0
World languages:    325      3303     9.8
Pbk "classics":     136       140    97.1
"New":             4097      5117    80.1
Oversize:           455       666    68.3
"Here & Now":       394       402    98.0
Young adult:       5681      7347    77.3
Reference:         4217     15368    27.4
Bookmobile:        1638      1977    82.9
Senior Center:      681       802    84.9

MISC TOTAL:       21918     50263    43.6

NOT INCLUDED (internal materials): book discussion books, office books

It's not that the above data was unimportant by any means (some of the
breakdowns I was actually unaware of until pursuing your question--some
of these pointed out some fine-tuning and reassigning we need to do):
it's just that many of these are merely large, undifferentiated groups
of books that essentially have no meaning (compared with what I
previously reported) other than that they represent "books" rather than
some other kind of material.

Hope this answers your question!

Harvey

--
===========================================
Harvey E. Hahn, Manager, Technical Services Department
Arlington Heights (Illinois) Memorial Library
847/506-2644 - FX: 847/506-2650 - Email: hhahn(at)ahml(dot)info
OML & Scripts web pages: http://www.ahml.info/oml/
Personal web pages: http://users.anet.com/~packrat
Received on Sat Mar 10 2007 - 15:48:37 EST