[open-bibliography] [ol-discuss] Multivolume works

[Karen Coyle]

On 5/4/12 6:50 AM, Wilkin, John wrote:

>
> So, really, HathiTrust can't take credit for getting the info right:  the
> source library got it right. (If the info is right, it's also the case
> that the source library got it wrong.)  It's a system design success,
> informed by understanding collections and collection management processes.
>   What's surprising, incidentally, is that, for Google-digitized content,
> Google has this information and ignores it.
>

Does anyone know where Google gets its data from? I've heard various 
explanations but none of them make sense to me.

Neither OL nor Google appear to have the concept of an "item" in the 
sense of a single physical copy. In fact, Google blurs this concept by 
taking bits and pieces from different scanned items and putting them 
together (e.g. to fill in missing or bad pages). OL definitely has scans 
that don't come with a barcode. (Some books that are scanned are not 
from libraries.)

I do wonder what the concept of "a copy" means in our digital future. 
When we make digital copies from hard copies we can make the connection, 
but presumably that doesn't work for born digital items, and it's not 
going to work for the various mash-ups that we get with digital file usage.

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
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