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Post by Mike Powell on Apr 26, 2007 10:49:45 GMT -6
Among things I most wish existed re LBH, would be a master index, of all things published on the subject. Not just of the publications, but of their contents. Ambitious, huh? But say I wanted to start small by melding just two indices, how could I do it? Obviously, I could hand key everything into a data set and then sort to my heart's content. What if I could find a collaborator out there on the web and we each input two indices and somehow combined the four? Does someone know of an efficient way this could be accomplished? Say this could be done on a scale large enough to be of value and it were made available for free use on the web, would it violate copyright? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
yours,
Mike Powell
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Post by harpskiddie on Apr 26, 2007 14:49:31 GMT -6
Mike:
I doubt that you would be infringing upon copyrights if you used only the title of the work and general descriptions of the content, rather than reproducing the actual content page - which in and of itself doesn't describe the details of the contents anyway [usually].
You could use generic terms, such as "political background" "Custer's Belknap troubles" "March up the Rosebud" etc.
BUT.....It would be a massive undertaking and you would wind up with a wiki-like effort in all probability. I do not have a really extensive LBH library [although I do have a terrific, if outdated bibliography], but I would not want to attempt what I think you mean in respect of even that small selection of material.
Good luck, my friend, if you do try.
Gordie,
the New Year's Eve we did the town, the day we tore the goalposts down........................
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Post by Mike Powell on Apr 27, 2007 10:32:48 GMT -6
Geordie,
I wasn't very clear, my common fault. I was considering combining the index portion of publications. Take for example Gray's Custer's Last Campaign. The index contains roughly 1,200 lines, maximum length about 35 characters. Utley's Cavalier In Buckskin a little less, maybe 1,100 items, about same character length. Say I'm interested in Lt. Algernon Smith. In Gray, he's on pages 358, 359 and 392. In Utley, pages 54, 89, 107, 136, 151 and 159. And in SOTMS, he's not listed. With more indexes added, the tool begins to be useful.
I could probably bang those first two indexes into an Excel spreadsheet in about a day each. Two wouldn't give me much more, if any, than just picking up each book and looking in the back. If I added SOTMS to the spreadsheet and sorted everything together, at least I'd know not to bother picking up SOTMS when I wanted to check into Lt. Smith again.
I'm fair with Excel, but don't know how a spreadsheet could be made available on the web for multiple contributors and users. Hoping there's a tech savvy out there who can suggest some way this could be done, as a Wiki thing or whatever?
Yours,
Mike Powell
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Post by harpskiddie on Apr 27, 2007 11:37:55 GMT -6
Now I'm guessing that you would be infringing. The index is an integral part of the work, and hence protected. Doing it for your own benefit would clearly be okay [I'm sure some people have already done something akin to it]; but I think "publishing" it, even to the web, might be an infringement of copyright.
Even if it were legal, it would be a herculean task. Do you have any idea of how many books and articles you are talking about? My bibliography, which hasn't been updated for TEN YEARS, lists hundreds of official documents or repositories of same, a few dozens of collected papers, hundreds of published and unpublished interview transcripts or notes, dozens of technical papers or books, hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and about 650 published books and pamphlets.
So take your two days for those three. Estimate an additional 300 items for the past ten years, giving a grand total of about 3,000, some of which you'd have to index yourself [articles, interviews, letters, etc.], and I'd guess a couple of thousand days of typing plus maybe another thousand of reading, which takes you up to about three thousand, not counting days off. So you're looking at maybe ten or twelve years, if you stick to it.
Sorta like promotion on the frontier!!! Happy keyboarding!!!!!!!!!!!
Gordie,
don't bother callin' darlin' 'cause your Gordie wiil be gone............................................
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