Can Project Gutenberg be added as an Add Books source?

Can Project Gutenberg be added as an Add Books source?

- main argument for: A whole lot of readers use it
- ethical argument for: It's a huge source for making out of copyright books broadly accessible and LT should support that kind of legal sharing

You can certainly designate Project Gutenberg in the "From where?" field when you are specifying where you obtained (or in this case, accessed) a particular book. I guess an argument could be made for adding it as a "Venue" there. But the field permits free text entry, so there's no constraint as it stands.

The hitch of it is, that while Project Gutenberg provides the full text of myriads of books, they do not supply the bibliographic data specs in the Z39.50 library-exchangeable format that makes it eligible to be a "Source" in LT. From what I can see, Project Gutenberg does not offer Z39.50 data for its titles. That is the protocol that LibraryThing uses when you search a source to Add Books. So I don't think that the proposal is technically feasible.

They do offer download of MARC records of their entire catalogue, so perhaps there's a way for developers to get those into OverCat without too much hassle
https://ebookfoundation.org/pgmarc.html

ETA: I add links on work pages when there's a Gutenberg or Standard Ebooks version available. I suspect that is more likely to lead people to those sites than having it as one of 5000 sources of bibliographic data. By all means do the same. Ditto for links on author pages whose works are in public domain and available there.

>3 SandraArdnas: to get those into OverCat without too much hassle

That's a different proposal, but a good one! Of course, Overcat would quickly fail to be "current" with Project Gutenberg. But it would be an additional value of Overcat to have even a significant partial Project Gutenberg catalog. Since Overcat shows the originating library of each record, it seems like it would be acceptable use of the download to include it in Overcat with "from Project Gutenberg" notations, although someone would have to do some diligence on the terms of use for that catalog.

>4 paradoxosalpha: Yes, I was thinking the same, that their data set would need to be 'refreshed' from time to time. I'm not entirely certain since it gets too technical for me, but they offer annual subsets, so theoretically those could be added periodically.

>3 SandraArdnas: Oh ! I didn't know about/hadn't noticed the MARC records. Though I haven't really spent as much time poking around since they did the site redesign... One of the things that sometimes annoys me is not always knowing what edition(s) the text is prepared from. Thanks for the tip. :)

I've thought about putting the PG book link into "from where?" but I think I prefer just using Project Gutenberg there, for easier sorting/filtering.

>3 SandraArdnas: where on the work page do you add the link?

I just want to add that there are different gutenberg sites (because of different copyright laws, so different texts are out of copyright in the US and elsewhere). I found out when I saw someone using a Gutenberg tag on a work I thought wasn't out of copyright yet.

Project Gutenberg Index Data is on the list of the sources; but it's marked as "auto detected as not working" for quite a while.

>7 dchaikin: On any work page, look at the right-hand column. "Links" are the fifth section from the top, below "Find It" and above the Popularity graph.

Edited to add: The page for Fortune and Men's Eyes has a link to Wikipedia.

>10 karenb: thanks

I would like to know LT’s policy and reasoning. But not sue anyone official has seen this

>12 dchaikin:

I don't think there's any LT "policy" at stake here. Project Gutenberg doesn't have an online database to be accessed in the z39.50 format that LT uses. The fact that they are listed as a source (but not working) as noted by >9 AndreasJ: demonstrates that LT policy favors the inclusion of the Project Gutenberg catalog(s) as a source.

Here you can see what catalog formats gutenberg.org makes available: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html
These include the MARC export that >3 SandraArdnas: mentioned, which would not be a "live" source like others in LT, but could be a way to get the data into LT's own Overcat, where it would show as records from Project Gutenberg.

>13 paradoxosalpha: thanks. I don’t fully understand. But I can look things up

The policy is that LT only supports two interfaces to get book info from sources, whatever Amazon uses, and z39.50 protocol. z39.50 is a standard protocol for libraries and LT has a small staff and doesn't have the resources to support more than that.

One of the people critical to getting the PG records into MARC format is Associate Professor Emeritus at WPU. For what it is worth, William Paterson University Library has records.

TLDR; use WPU as a source for PG records -- I tried project gutenberg as a search; there were ~5K results in LT.