Thanks Steve for showing interest
Steve Toub wrote:
> Very interesting, Jan. Thanks for sharing.
>
>> It takes less than five minutes to create an e-record by reusing an
>> p-record and add the
>> fiels necessary to transform the record to an e-record.
>
> Are you making the edits manually or have you automated this process in
> some way?
I do it manually but would love automation but that seems to be a dream
that will take 5-10 years before it hits ground.
>
>
>> I have collected by myself up to today more than 17.000 e-books.
> > I can do about 10.000 per year
>
> Wow! Is your employer supportive of this or are you doing this on your
> own time?
This is part of a project. My hopeless dream is by showing the way others
would follow. Only a couple of small special libraries have been inspired,
and started cataloguing OA working papers in the political field.
Libraries all over the world pays for ebrary or/and Netlibrary books, in
spite of the fact that most of the titles are uninteresting, the
selection is
to 95% belove all descent quality criteria. The can fool a student but how
can the fool academic libraries? That's strange.
In theory any library could import my 17.000 titles for free but why don't
they do that? I can understand that nobody outside Sweden is interested
in the Swedish e-books but why not the rest?
We are still too much in the pulp business and we have handed over to
much power to commercial companies selling "Big Deals".
>
>> So what is the point to mecanically harvest GBS
>> URLs if most of it
>> is not of any value?
>
> Hmmm. One man's trash is another man's treasure. I think I'd have a hard
> time convincing a faculty member at my institution that a volume we had
> in print wasn't worth being digitized.
That may be right, but we have a specific men and women, academics and
they are not interested in haveing "everything" digitlized. You can use
Bradford's law 20/80. Only twenty percent of the Google books is of
interest and because I'm working in a Swedish context, maybe just 5-10%
will be of interest in Sweden.
>
> I've heard that the selection process takes more effort/time than the
> technical processing--folks like Google may be scanning everything on
> the shelf since it's too much effort to do the selection. How much time
> to do spend on "selection" to separate the trash from the treasure?
Compared with a librarian what is Google? We have been around now
for thousands of years, long before Google and even universities and
selection is our speciality. We have never acquired everything.
Google is just a clever machine making a lot of money on a commercial
market.
How much time I spend "selecting"? Less than 5%, rest is boring and
mechanical cataloguing.
Yesterday I made these twenty four books in the afternoon
Fritt tillgänglig från Center for Contemporary Arab Studies
http://ccas.georgetown.edu/research-papers.cfm
Summa: 12 fria e-böcker 17.10.07
Fritt tillgänglig via Swisspeace
http://www.swisspeace.ch/typo3/en/publications/working-papers/index.html
Summa: 12 fria e-böcker 17.10.07
and selected and catalogued about 25 from:
Fritt tillgänglig via Religion Online
http://www.religion-online.org/listbooks.asp
The titles on this list is really
going from trash to treasure. I will select less than 50% of these about
two hundred titles when I continue later today with the project.
Jan
>
> --SET
--
Jan Szczepanski
Förste bibliotekarie
Goteborgs universitetsbibliotek
Box 222
SE 405 30 Goteborg, SWEDEN
Tel: +46 31 773 1164 Fax: +46 31 163797
E-mail: Jan.Szczepanski_at_ub.gu.se
Received on Thu Oct 18 2007 - 03:40:15 EDT