Tim Spalding wrote:
> I've got a simple tester up at LibraryThing, while we figure what to do with it:
> http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=46336
>
> To those of us who promoted the use of library data outside of
> libraries, it is another setback.
> ... Another step down the long path to irrelevance.
>
You gotta be kidding. For, under
http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=46336
you write:
"The trick is, the data isn't very full. It has title, author (creator),
date, ISBN, format, publisher and 'subject.'
"The title is dicey. Subtitles are given as second titles, but sometimes
the second title is just an alternate title or the same title again.
Authors are given in first-last format, so LibraryThing has to guess
what the last name is and what the first name is. Mark Twain can, of
course, easily become 'Twain, Mark' but what about 'American Society of
Psychologists'—is Psychologists the last name? ISBN is the only
identifier, with no Library of Congress Numbers or OCLC numbers. Format
is usually pages, but not always, and lacks dimension information
that—although we're not using it now—we could use it from Amazon and
libraries. Subject is sometimes one or more Library of Congress Subject
Headings, with no hierarchy I've found, and sometimes BISC headings—it's
completely useless."
So what does that tell us about "relevance" of the GB metadata?
It ought to be a simple job to provide a similar API for any ILS that
delivers data in the same manner but of much better quality. The
question is just why not many are currently doing such. MARC, for one
thing, is certainly not an obstacle to this - and no API user would
have to be confronted with it.
Our closed attitudes (or let's say the closed attitudes of American
libraries) are more to do with a reluctance toward free access than
with technology complexities or incompetence.
B.E.
Received on Mon Sep 29 2008 - 03:32:38 EDT