[Sca-librarians] introduction

[Greg Lindahl]

Hello! I'm not a librarian in real life, but I occasionally pretend to
be one on the 'net. I thought I'd introduce a couple of projects which
could use some help, and which you folks might find interesting.

I have some webpages at http://aands.org/books.html and below which deal
with:

1) Cataloging SCA-interesting books on the Internet. While there are
lots of projects putting books online, they often aren't cataloged so
well, and finding SCA-relevant stuff in any catalog can be challenging
if you don't know what you're looking for. So I have a list of
catalogs at:

http://aands.org/onlinebooks.html

and at

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/onlinebooks/

I have an example of a catalog, a subset of the "Online Books Page"
catalog of free Internet books. The subset is generated with some
scripts of mine. I hope to be able to do the same in the future to
the Million Books project, and if any other large catalogs spring up,
like perhaps the Google projects, I'll look into those to.

Anyway, for this project I could use help finding more online
SCA-relevant books. If they're in English and aren't yet in the
"Online Books Page" catalog, which is often the case for new books,
I also let the Online Books people know about them.

2) Bibliographies. I think annotated bibliographies are a great
resource, and I have a collection of them at:

http://aands.org/bib.html

I could use help finding more, and of course we all have a friend or
two who could generate one of these on their favorite subject, so
perhaps you could encourage your friends to write one.

3) New online books. I've been involved with the Project Gutenberg
Distributed Proofreaders site, which basically takes scans of out of
copyright books and converts them to high-quality texts. A text is
often a lot more useful than just page images, even if it is a lot of
work to OCR and correct.  I have a page about this at:

http://aands.org/newbooks.html

The work gets done by a few thousand volunteers, and I suspect some of
you might be interested in helping out with the proofreading. I have a
list of SCA-relevant books in progress on the page just mentioned.
There's a lot of great stuff in progress, like Holinshed's _Chronicles
of England_, which is the books from which Shakespeare learned all his
history. Another interesting series they've done is the US copyright
renewal records, which can help find books published in the US between
1923 and 1963 whose copyright wasn't renewed. That should be an
interesting source of public domain materials now that it's possible
to exhaustively search for the renewal, which was often neglected by
publishers.

Anyway, I see that some of the "what's new" for the online catalog has
been posted in the past, and if people are interested, I'll continue
to post them here about once a month.

-- Gregory