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   Cookiefiend (lperry2@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 21:48:14 JST Cookiefiend

   @josh0 The switch from card catalogues to electronic cataloguing was a tragedy. I was a librarian early in my working life and participated in that switch. The tracking (all of the subjects that a book could be listed under) was far more extensive on those old cards. When we switched to computers, we only transferred the info on the first three cards. So much information was lost in that transition.

   • Rich Felker repeated this.
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     brokengoose (brokengoose@infosec.exchange)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 21:48:26 JST brokengoose

     in reply to

     @LPerry2 @josh0

     What's especially infuriating about the card catalogs is that it would have been almost the same effort to have made something EVEN BETTER. Imagine a "meta card" with all of the related books and categories that every library had contributed.

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 21:49:19 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • brokengoose

     @brokengoose @LPerry2 @josh0 Better couldn't happen because all the techbro scammers back then were rushing to be the one to capture and enclose libraries' data rather than there being a public-interest campaign to preserve and enhance.

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     David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) (david_chisnall@infosec.exchange)'s status on Monday, 30-Dec-2024 22:27:29 JST David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • brokengoose

     @dalias @brokengoose @LPerry2 @josh0 It's amazingly difficult to find good book data. Most things use Amazon's database (with all of the tracking that comes with) because everything else is so much worse.

     Publishers seem to treat their slice of the ISBN database as something to sell, rather than something that, as part of the commons, would increase the value of the books that they sell. This means any kind of mapping between ISBNs and books is hard (and it's a many-to-many relationship since an ISBN identifies a print volume, which may be a single edition of a book or an omnibus edition that includes multiple logical books). Building any kind of meaningful ontology on top of this is really hard. Wikidata trues but is missing a lot of things.

     LibraryThing provided services to libraries before being bought by Amazon but their data is really bad. Lots of books seem to have been entered by using computer vision on the cover so the title fields include every word on the cover, such as 'the new novel in the X series' and so on. So much value is lost to society by there being no maintained database for this. I suspect the amount that half a dozen libraries pay as a result of it not existing could completely fund its development and maintenance.