507 words
Two things for a better internet experience happened today. The first was E. Naeher's comment pointing to the RedLightGreen catalogue as an improvement to the WorldCat catalogue I mentioned yesterday. Yep, interface-wise that's pretty much what I've been looking for. Very promising. It seems to be a very young project still and there may be a lot left to do, but it doesn't start off with a broken user interface that has to accomodate the quirks of the system behind it. The most pressing issues in my little test run were the quality of the databases they're using and degree to which records have to be merged to make it truely useful. Let me state a few observations.
Jänich, although there are books in the catalogue. This looks like broken (i.e. English) records and, when looking at the links, encoding problems. At least the latter shouldn't be an issue these days.
Subjectsprovided seem very random. When searching for
Vector BundlesWhy can I choose
Vector Bundles – Congressesbut it's not related to
Vector Bundles? Why can't I simply limit my search results to a broad area like
Mathematics, say? For example in this search, all the top results are maths related. Still the top
Subjectsto come up are completely unrelated.
Web Services. It's pretty cool. And even more useful.
These were my first impressions. I dig the idea of having a sane UI to the whole thing and I see a couple of good and new ideas working there. I can't see how the database can be improved to be perfectly good, though, if only for its sheer volume.
Okay, so for a while now, I’ve been looking for something like an IMDB for books. It seems that Sven-S. Porst over at Quarter Life Crisis has gone and solicited a good candidate: RedLightGreen. I hope this replaces retail links…
I was warned that starting a blog while managing a project might be a bit demanding – and i haven’t been as attentive to this as i have been to the project itself. So it goes. I just had someone…
In Quarter Life Crisis’s section Refining, Prost writes: The catalogue also supports refining searches, which is a very good idea and can be very helpful. Unfortunately the Subjects provided seem very random. When searching for Vector Bundles Why can I…
In Quarter Life Crisis’s section Refining, Prost writes: The catalogue also supports refining searches, which is a very good idea and can be very helpful. Unfortunately the Subjects provided seem very random. When searching for Vector Bundles Why can I…
I was warned that starting a blog while managing a project might be a bit demanding – and i haven’t been as attentive to this as i have been to the project itself. So it goes. I just had someone…
FYI, I’ve tried a track back ping to this message twice:
2003.10.25 02:16:10 198.144.208.168 Ping ‘http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/mt/mt-tb.cgi/436’ failed: HTTP error: 500 read timeout 2003.10.25 06:17:41 198.144.208.168 Ping ‘http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/mt/mt-tb.cgi/436’ failed: HTTP error: 500 read timeout
Judith, our server is a bit crappy and frequently fails to run the scripts properly.
Usually your message arrives, though, it’s just that the web page doesn’t get updated.
I’ll go read your post now…
I’m happy to point out that we’ve made the change so that your links to searches and to editions will now work.
Yay. I regret it took so long.
We’ll be rebuilding and redesigning the database this is based on early next year. The pilot is a success, and we’ll be bringing the database in synch with the source database. The way we cluster editions will change, although it will be hard to bring translations into the same group as the original unless the catalogers follow proper practice and add the original untranslated title to the record. (Not always done by a long stretch.)
I hope you’ll find us more useful now!
Thanks for the heads-up Judith.
It’s good to see the service evolve.