Referring to...
In which I rant about things that bother me because I think they're encoding bad librarianship[?]. Yet I know nothing about library science - or the Sematic Web, or knowledge representation, whatever. Sorry. Corrections hoped for.
The ISBN is a bad choice for the default ID of books mentioned online.
- Plenty of books were published without an ISBN; many of those are still in copyright, so we can't 'just digitize them'. (Are books still published without ISBN? In what countries, in what sense of 'published'?)
- No way built into the ISBN to get from the ISBN for one physical representation of a book to the ISBN for another representation; so no good way for autodiscovery that two mentions refer to the same thing.
- And what about books that are available online?
- most of which were published well before the ISBN;
- some are copies of a text which may have been republished with an ISBN;
- some are approximations of several physical versions, so are bibliographically distinct although related to the others.
- And what about non-books: obviously Webpages, but also broadcasts, music, journal articles; heck, any time-space coördinate.
Unfortunately,
The ISBN is a great online ID for books.
It's common, recognizable and short enough to build apps around.
- With John Udell's bookmarklet, you can look up an ISBN at many public libraries, or Amazon, or....
-
AllConsuming can aggregate references to what people are reading, as long as they use the ISBN and link to one of the main stores.
- Or there's a MovableType plugin, based on AllConsuming, to create a link to Amazon's book page, and put a little picture of the front cover on your blog.
Three things about these make me unneccesarily cranky. The first is that we're too effin' close to trashing everything older than the ISBN anyhow. I'm not [forgot his name] who gets all miffy about electronic catalogs because 'a word incised in stone demands to be read as stone'; I think everything good about card catalogs
can be encoded in an online catalog (except the smell), and more and better besides; although I doubt it always is. But I do worry that old books and their contents are hard to get. It doubly bugs me that ignoring any pre-ISBN book loses pre-TV history, because it seems to me that we are especially bad at remembering anything before TV. Old fuzzy newsreels may appear mostly as
background in cheap amusement, but that's what makes them the unquestioned Way Things Used to Be. Separate rant there, sorry.
The second thing that bothers me is an increase in encouraging us all to read the same things at the same time. Individual blogs do this only weakly; bestseller lists and AllConsuming strongly. I don't think there's an equally strong online method to find 'more like this' measured by subtler similarities. What I miss is the great joy of seeing all the possible cross-reference subjects in a card catalog, once I had finally found the entry I was looking for.
And, pettily, the pictures of the covers annoy me a lot. With a link to an online store right there, why waste space and attention to attract the magpie brain? (Because some people want to pick it up in a physical place: okay, fair.) I'm looking forward to print-on-demand so I can get the books I want hardcopy all the same size, and bound to match. If all my books were the same size, I could pack them in my bookcases much more efficiently. If they were all bound with my binding, I could retrieve them from my friends' shelves, especially if I included RFID. I wave my hand in lordly fashion to assume that the careful work of layout & design for each book can be scaled to fit the sizes I like (wide margins?).
And look! the annoying detail work about how to refer to anything anyone might want to look up has been well-begun! They're even going to be in my town this fall.
At least one other book-reviewing enthusiast has worked out an RDF by which an item announces which items it's about.
Catalogablog does know about libraries, and has a list of blog-suitable metadata initiatives.
There should be a public-knowledge database of books, for everyone to refer to. Maybe being the de facto database is worth enough to Amazon that they would commit to providing an interface to the skeleton of their data; it might not be worth the effort, esp. as they're now linked to without promising anything.
Maybe one could be assembled by scraping library databases; hm; do libraries own their databases, do they buy rights from publishers, do they share data already?
Linkrot
Some problems with referring to things online:
- they vanish
- they move
- they get edited and make your comments irrelevant
- I might really be referring to both a source and a process: for instance, for the many things kept in 'dirty ASCII', maybe I should be scrupulous and say both that I started with the data at [URI1], but read it after it was processed by the program at [URI2]. Examples:
- I read an online text after it's been HTML-prettied by one program, or turned into a .pdb file by another
- The English-language version of something I read (a foreign newspaper?) was generated by a particular translating program; boy, there's something to hack to damage international relations.
Some fixes:
caching the copy you first saw; permalinks; store a hash instead of a version# or ISBN.
So wrote clew in
Meta.
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