Re: ISFDB Spoiler Policy Question

On Jun 27, 1:11 am, "Robert A. Woodward" <rober...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article
<1182889899.793287.259...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

Ahasuerus <ahasue...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 25, 11:26 pm, "Robert A. Woodward" <rober...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
In article <1182748937.062985.65...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

Ahasuerus <ahasue...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 25, 1:00 am, "Robert A. Woodward" <rober...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip]
Is there a way to quickly check to see if any of the books in my
collection are not in theISFDB? (including variant editions). I
don't want to check titles 5000+ times.

Do you happen to have a catalog of your collection? If you do, we can
write a program to compare what you have with what theISFDBhas and
generate a list of differences. If you don't have a catalog, then, um,
I am not sure what we could do, but we could try to brainstorm it.

I have the books listed in a Filemaker Pro database; I can generate
text files in various formats.

If you want to export it in basic CSV format (or any other plain text
format that you like) and send the resulting file to my e-mail
address, I'll see what I can do :) Our primary programmer, Al von
Ruff, is currently busy saving the world, but many other moderators
have access to a copy of the database and can run scans/exports/etc.

What data fields do you want? (besides Author & Title of course).

Probably all of them -- we can always ignore irrelevant columns like
the internal catalog number.

For those who are interested in the internals, the ISFDB has fairly
extensive database documentation available online. You can also
download and review our latest MySQL backup, which is self-documented
if you are familiar with MySQL. We have detailed online instructions
explaining what kind of data we expect to be entered in what field,
e.g. how to enter pseudonyms, variant forms of the title, etc. I will
post a few pointers to the relevant ISFDB Wiki page once the server
wakes up.

The executive summary is that we try to capture the following data
elements for each printing (note: each printing, not just each
edition) of each publication:

Title as specified on the title page (as opposed to the cover/spine or
the copyright page)
Author(s) exactly as specified on the title page (including middle
initials, non-ASCII characters, etc)
Publication Year (not the copyright year or the year of the first
publication)
Publisher as stated
Number of pages (the "vii+243" format is supported, the last page with
relevant text is the last page number for our purposes)
Publication type: novel, collection, anthology, magazine, non-genre,
non-fiction, fanzine, omnibus (there is an order of precedence in case
a book is, e.g., both a collection and non-genre)
ISBN: 10 digits only at the moment; if there is no ISBN stated, we
capture the publisher's catalog ID
URL of the cover if available on the Web and if we have permission to
link to it
Price: primary (typically US or UK) price only, other prices (e.g.
Canadian or Commonwealth) go into the Notes field
Artist(s)' name
Binding: mass market paperback size (18 cm), trade paperback size (>18
cm), hardcover, digest, pulp, etc
Notes: free text information about this particular printing

We also collect higher level information that applies to all editions
and printings of a given book:

Synopsis: no spoilers, please
Series name
Series number
Date of first publication (for books, it's the date of first
publication in book form, serializations are linked via a separate
mechanism)
URL of the related Wikipedia article (ObCrossThread!)
Notes: free text information about the book as a whole as opposed to
the printing-specific Notes field above. For example, if a book is a
fixup, this is where we would enter a list of stories that it was
based on

Naturally, all of this data is internally normalized, tabularized and
otherwise massaged. Our online editing tools let you do all kinds of
other things, e.g. designate different titles as "variant titles",
create pseudonyms, enter collection/anthology contents, add author
data and create special magazine editor bibliographies. We also walk
dogs :)

To go back to Robert's question, we wouldn't want to use a database
dump like the one he is proposing to populate the ISFDB database since
it would likely introduce a number of errors. However, if we could
write a quick and dirty scan that would compare Robert's database with
what we already have cataloged, we could then generate a list of
discrepancies and get the number of books to be manually entered/
reviewed down to a more manageable level.

.

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