Let me reiterate a suggestion I made at an earlier time. I think it would be very good to institute a member generated tag system modeled on the one at Open Library. The tag could be many things and could effectively increase the number of categories tremendously. If later viewers of the metadata of a particular book deemed a tag as being inappropriate then they could remove them too. If a catalog entry was bereft of categories then a person who is looking at it could just add the categories on the spot. Then there could be a special field on the advanced search form to enter a possible tag to search for all books in the collection that were so tagged. There might also be a combo box from which one could choose from the most popular tags. I am thinking of this as an augmentation of the current categories, but I do note that Open Library uses that system entirely for categorization.
_ _ _"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world." - Richard Dawkins
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/rogerbailey81 The Militant: http://www.themilitant.com Pathfinder Press: http://www.pathfinderpress.com Granma International: http://www.granma.cu/ingles/index.html----- Original Message ----- From: "Mayrie ReNae" <mayrierenae@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2011 3:27 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: curious about Latest books
HI Denise,We are actually working on getting volunteer help with categorization of PQbooks. And engineering staff knows about the problem too and solutions on that front are being worked on too. When we iron out all the logistics of how best to employ volunteers in tandem with staff, either via this list, or in-house to categorize books, I'll definitely let you all know! Mayrie _____ From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Denise Thompson Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2011 12:07 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: curious about Latest books Thanks Mary I'm glad staff is aware of the problem. It definitely starts to impact Bookshares effectiveness though if readers can't find books. Yes we can check a favorite author, but that's very limiting. There's no way to know about potential new books we might be interested in and new authors tochoose from. Isn't there some way volunteers could work on categorizing the books? With the current situation, members aren't able to take advantage ofthe progress being made from publishers greatly increasing the numbers of books in the collection. The odd twist is that when we were scanning them ourselves we actually had more books available because we could at least identify them. Denise At 10:56 PM 9/6/2011, you wrote: Hi Denise, You're right. Publisher quality books are not categorized. They'reautomatically put into the collection after being cleaned up, and convertedto daisy and braille by Bookshare's conversion tools. The choosing of categories seems to be something that requires the human touch at this point.I guess the only way you could know about new books is to search by authorsthat you know write frequently in a particular genre. Staff is very aware of this problem, and we're working on getting it fixed so that PQ books will have categories. We just don't know how that will happen yet. But we do know it's a pain in the neck not to have categories for books and want that to change too! Mayrie _____ From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [ <mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Denise Thompson Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2011 5:19 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] curious about Latest books Hi Folks I'm cuious about how books are being added to the collection these days. I have a link set up to bring up the latest books to the collection in thecategories of mistery and thrillers, romance, lit and fiction and westerns. It seems like now for quite a while we can go for days without any new books showing up. It stays the same. Yet I thought we were getting all these books added from publishers. So my question is are they just added and they aren'tgiven dates or I've checked a number of them and they weren't categorized. So that's maybe why they don't show up. The new books must be being addedsome where. Like for example, Alter of bones has been the book on the top ofmy list and it hasn't changed since last thursday. And Justice by Karen Robards never did show up on my latest book list. I found it because I periodically look up favorite authors and see if their new book is there when I know it has come out and haven't seen it yet. Justice was in the collection and apparently came from the publisher. It was submitted by bookshare staff it says and it was not categorized. That's probably why it didn't show up. So if all of the books aren't being categorized how are we supposed to find them Especially if we don't always know the exact name, etc. Denise
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