Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
<snip>
Weinheimer Jim wrote:
> In Google Books, the American Classical School at Athens has made lots of books available for free. These are especially useful to my students and faculty. I do not have time to catalog them all, and in any case, they seem to still be adding them. I made the following record: http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?bib=22971 where the 856 field uses a Google query. So, I cataloged it as a type of collection. Quick and dirty, I admit, but otherwise, the materials in Google can't be found.
This is clever. A next step occurs to me. Instead of simply making a
collection record, an automated process could be created that uses that
same query to actually download metadata from Google Book Search, using
the Google Book Search Data API.
</snip>
I like this a lot. Another idea: we could populate the local record using the Google info taking the name and title into separate 774 fields. The resulting record may be horrifying to see with hundreds of 774 fields but perhaps something could be figured out.
<snip>
[I wonder how likely users are to stumble upon your collection record at
the moment? Seem like they'd be more likely to stumble upon the
individual items, even if they are 'bad' limited records, possibly
without even LCSH. Or you could automatically assign some generic
collection-level LCSH to them all, although that's not the way LCSH is
intended to be used, it might be effective anyway.]
</snip>
With these books, all on Greek antiquities, the subjects on the collective record may be OK, but for others, I don't know. For now, I've incorporated it into my Extend Search, where I search Google Books for "university press" using this query, adding into it the users' search terms:
http://books.google.com/books?lr=&as_brr=1&q=inpublisher%3Auniversity+inpublisher%3Apress&btnG=Search+Books
and search for "rome"
http://books.google.com/books?lr=&as_brr=1&q=rome+inpublisher%3Auniversity+inpublisher%3Apress&btnG=Search+Books
Still, this misses lots of other good resources, e.g. items published by scholarly foundations, and so on. It's a step.
As you point out, this is very doable and can be improved in many ways!
James L. Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
Rome, Italy
Received on Thu Oct 29 2009 - 05:58:12 EDT