How much library info is too much?
Library-expansion is another day or so off, but librarians and other interested parties are invited to weigh in on what new fields I should provide.
"MARC" records open up a world of data. I can finally parse all names correctly, add secondary authors, strip "a"s and "the"s from sorting, separate out publisher, place of publication and date of publication, and even wring automated sense from "xix, 230; ill., 25 cm."
I don't want to go overboard. Library records have more in them than most users need. Who but an institution needs to distinguish between "Uniform Title," "Title Statement" and "Varying forms of Title"? Who scans their shelves confused between Dan Brown (1964–), author of the Da Vinci Code, and Dan Brown (n.d.) the publisher of the 1704 tract Novum Lumen Chirurgicum vindicatum?
For starters I can dump publisher and physical info into the "publication" field. And I can put everything into a static "card catalog" field, as I currently do with Library of Congress data. But what details should I "pull out" and allow to be edited, sorted by, and displayed in catalog view?
My candidates are:
"MARC" records open up a world of data. I can finally parse all names correctly, add secondary authors, strip "a"s and "the"s from sorting, separate out publisher, place of publication and date of publication, and even wring automated sense from "xix, 230; ill., 25 cm."
I don't want to go overboard. Library records have more in them than most users need. Who but an institution needs to distinguish between "Uniform Title," "Title Statement" and "Varying forms of Title"? Who scans their shelves confused between Dan Brown (1964–), author of the Da Vinci Code, and Dan Brown (n.d.) the publisher of the 1704 tract Novum Lumen Chirurgicum vindicatum?
For starters I can dump publisher and physical info into the "publication" field. And I can put everything into a static "card catalog" field, as I currently do with Library of Congress data. But what details should I "pull out" and allow to be edited, sorted by, and displayed in catalog view?
My candidates are:
- Secondary authors, editors and illustrators (It is likely their role will be elided, except in the cataloging field)
- Number of pages (Arabic numeral pages only)
- Language
posted by Tim at 11:57 PM
26 Comments:
I second secondary authors and language. I'd also like to see Edition and LCCN. And maybe a little more room in the title field - I'm using LibraryThing for a church's collection (dunstan), and man, some of those authors are long-winded.
Thanks for all you do, from this professional catalog librarian. LT is the spark that got me to catalog in my free time too. Cheers!
Fields in Marc I'd really like in LT
* additional authors/illustrators/editors
* language
* edition
* series
thanks :)
Alasen did a good list there. Really, I don't need any more than I already have, but if you are going to add more, series would be especially nice for me. I seem to be overrun with series books.
I'll be back to cataloguing tomorrow, I think. Way too busy today to get anything done. But I wanted to stop by here and thank you again. This is a wonderful and useful tool for those of us who have never had a good handle on what's on the shelves.
I'd really appreciate a field for translators.
It could help to narrow down searches for popular ancient texts which have been translated many times.
Thank you for LibraryThing, it is a great service!
blast, I wish I'd thought of tagging my books by spine colour, that's how they're shelved at home. I bet quite a lot of us do that. It looks pretty, and if you have a good visual memory it works as well as any other system.
For colour, note that a lot of the information in bib. records is reused by different libraries, and whilst uncommon it's not unknown for a book to be reissued with a different-coloured cover yet retain the same ISBN. (There's at least one in the thirty or so books-with-images I have). And if you have a dust-jacket and a differently coloured cover, which is astonishingly common...
...& if you're needing to find it, then spine colour helps much better - and spine colour often differs significantly from jacket colour. Probably more trouble than it's worth unless you explicitly intend to have colour be a sorting system, and this is a lot more common among private users than libraries.
(Random thought: I know someone who sorted all his books by colour, considered the pile of black ones left over, and decided that inserting them in the solar-spectrum absorption lines would look good. I love this idea.)
I want to add in a plug for series--right now I've been using tags to help keep it all straight, but it'd be nice to have that info in a field rather than with all the other tags.
I'm loving LibraryThing, especially with all the neat new things that keep coming! You're doing great work.
Couple of requests, please.
Language is fine but I would prefer original language and translated language. I would like to know, for example, how many books I have in English that are translated from Russian. Sadly, many books are not translated into English. I therefore have books, for example, in German translated from Norwegian or in French translated from Portuguese.
On dates, I would like to have both original publication date and date of edition I own. I like to see, particularly for fiction, what are the author's books in chronological order, though the editions I have may not be the original editions.
Thanks for all your hard work on this.
Incidentally, I'm not serious about adding color! I just wonder why Marc doesn't capture it when it seems to have other categories with dubious claims to stability and Platonic fact-ness. The spine-title is, no doubt, some graphic designer's decision. The use of the spine title is that a librarian might be called upon to look for it and, as well all know, knowing what color a book is can be an incredible help when looking for it.
I agree with Alasen's ideas - particularly series. Could it possible then to search for a series, and upload all books in it?
Speaking as a not-a-librarian, let me second (or third, or whatever) support for "secondary authors"; it's irritating to need to remember who is listed as primary author on a book (and thus, who I need to search on to find it!)
Keffas makes a great point. If/when I get around to cataloguing my philosophy collection on this site, sorting by translator makes all the difference in the world. (Do a search for Machiavelli's "The Prince" to see the value of this.)
Tim, a huge thank you for LT! It has made the nightmare that is our home library much more manageable.
I support the requests for secondary authors, orginal language, translated language, series, and for two separate fields for orig pub date and my edition date.
Question: How do you link the records for an author who has books published by her maiden and married names? Is there an AKA field in the MARC records?
Anonymous above - authors have what's called an authority file - the biggest put out by the library of congress (authorites.loc.gov) (although other countries do have our own, LC comes first at least in my country) which state the "official" name for a person (or place, or subject etc). The alternate names are linked to this record. Searching for an alternate name will give you a link which tells you to look at the official name (which it will link to.) This can be loaded into your local library's catalogue for the books they hold.
Hope that makes sense :)
And ooh, yes, I should have mentioned the two date thing, I'd like that too :)
second (third?) authors, series would be very nice. So would not-sorting by "a" and "the"... you've covered most of mine...
Sorry, I'm still sitting here rather stunned at the idea of sorting books by their spine color... that's incredible. I'm a visual learner, but dang, that wouldn't even occur to me. I like them nice and simple... all fiction sorted by author, the non-fiction sorted by subject. So the cookbooks are in the kitchen, the writing stuff is near the computer, the craft stuff near that... Of course, the children's stuff lives in several rooms, and believe it or not, I sort it almost as arbitrarily as color would be. Board books in my daughter's room, then picture books and readers have separate shelves, then short chapter books are separate from novels. And the kids books migrate constantly, it seems.
Color. Hmmm. Clothes, yes. Books, that would drive me nuts. Especially the random black ones living somewhere in between. That would be a sight to see, wouldn't it?
Language,
While the date field does indeed have room for two dates, it is cumbersome to do it that way. Moreover, it makes date searching difficult (yes, I know, date searching is not yet available but I would hope it will be some day), e.g. if you want all the book you have that were published before a specific date or which were originally published before a specific date.
if you're talking about color-sorting, an artist in SF reshelved an entire used bookstore by color for a week. It was rather impressive to see, though, for a used book shopper who doesn't know what color cover his title might have, it is awkward. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4182224
I second the other suggestions made here, and would like to add the Contents field (505), where individual story titles are listed. I have a lot of short story anthologies and would like to be able to list/search their contents.
bibliaddict, I've already asked Tim that by email. I think that it is (or could be) quite a lot of work - especially if you want the individual stories to have tags / comments as well.
Extending LibraryThing to cover journals and magazines is another feature I would like.
However I think Tim should concentrate on core functionality for the time being. Once things are more stable then is the time for these type of major changes.
The reason a uniform title (MARC 240) exists is to be able to group items that come from the same source. This is particularly helpful for translations. For example, you can have the uniform title for "Romeo and Juliet" as "Romeo and Juliet. English" or "Romeo and Juliet. Russian." That way, when you do a sort or search, you can easily see that your collection has the play in several translations. Of course, you can still search do a title search by using "Romeo i Dzhul'etta" if you're looking for a particular translation.
If other users will be inputting items that are translated, I think this line item would be invaluable. I would personally like the uniform title to be included if at all possible.
I do understand wanting the records to be free of clutter, though. Would anyone else want to see this feature?
Thanks for explaining the uniform title. At first I was excited. Such a field might really be useful for something like Greek and Latin literature. There ought to be some way for the computer to know that Aristophanes' "Women of the Assembly," "Assembly Women," "Women in Congress," "Ecclesiazusae" and Ekklesiazusai" are the same work.
That said, it doesn't seem to be very commonly used. Indeed, for Greek plays at least, I couldn't find the field used in ten minutes of looking, first for Aristophanes and then for Moliere, at both the Library of Congress and Yale.
It's rarity convinced me that it's just not worth putting in it's own field. But I'll include it in the "card catalog."
Tim
I want to add in a plug for series--right now I've been using tags to help keep it all straight, but it'd be nice to have that info in a field rather than with all the other tags.
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ditto
Hey Tim-- I did find a record for Aristophanes! LCCN (Library of Congress Catalog Number) 96052486 has a 240 that says "Ecclesiazusae. English"-- and the title on the book itself says "Assembly of women = Ecclesiazusae (by) Aristophanes ; translated with an introduction by Robert Mayhew."
I should add, as a further plug, that this works well for grouping things of different media, too. So you can have something like "Lord of the Rings" and "Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (motion picture)" sort together too.
I'm not sure if anyone else has mentioned this, since I am new to LT as of today. Great application, Tim!
If I do not find the exact edition I hold, but do find a record that is close enough, then I add it (in library language, I am "copy cataloguing") to my catalogue and edit it to make the dates, edition statement and imprint correct. I notice, however, that the MARC data for the edition I do not hold but that I used to copy catalogue still displays on the finished catalogue record. This creates a disagreement between "what's above" and "what's below" on the LT catalogue record. MARC data used as a basis for copy cataloguing perhaps should be automatically removed as soon as the user edits (at least) any edition or date information.
I think this comment relates to "how much is too much". Perhaps my long years of professional bibliographic work are getting the better of me!
What a fun app! I am telling all my colleagues.
The main thing I would love right now is the 520 field for a short annotation. Right now I can use either "comments" or "reviews" for this info, but neither is what I need - also the LT "summary" field was not intended for this purpose.
Other than that, I'd second what others have said about Series (440/490), Contents (505), and "smart" titles that skip 'a' and 'the'.
Thanks!
I work tech support for a library automation software company. I understand a lot about MARC records, and if I can be of any help, feel free to email me. (posicatATpobox.com ... just change the AT to the symbol)
I would suggest the 856 tag for links to other sites.
440 series tag might be usefull for series information.
082 for the dewy decimal might be nice for people who have
It would also be nice to be able to search by not just ISBN, but LCCN and ISSN, if you're using Z39.50 it should be easy.
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