Bibliographic database
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A bibliographic or library database is a database of bibliographic information. It may be a database containing information about books and other materials held in a library (e.g. an online library catalog, or OPAC) or, as the term is more often used, an electronic index to journal or magazine articles, containing citations, abstracts--and often either the full text of the articles indexed, or links to the full text.
Many scientific databases are bibliographic databases, but some are not. Within Chemical Abstracts, for example, there are databases of chemical structures, within Entrez there are databases of sequences. Outside of science, the same holds: there are databases of citations to articles in art history journals, and there are databases of images, such as ARTstor.
Some notable databases are discussed briefly below. For a list of bibliographic databases by subject, see List of bibliographic databases.
Contents |
[edit] Library book databases
These databases are intended to be employed by college and university students to identify and locate books for class work and research. The books are then usually obtained through the catalog of the specific library, or via Interlibrary loan.
[edit] General
[edit] OCLC
[edit] Online general-interest book databases
The following databases are intended primarily for general rather than academic use, and are constructed less formally than the others discussed above.
[edit] Internet Book Database
| URL | http://www.ibookdb.net/<tr><th>Commercial?</th><td>No</td></tr> |
|---|---|
| Type of site | Online Book Database<tr><th>Registration</th><td>Optional</td></tr> |
| Owner | |
| Created by | <tr><th>Launched</th><td>August 2005</td></tr> |
The Internet Book Database (IBookDB) is an online database with information about books and authors with an added social networking component. It was started as an effort to be the IMDb equivalent for books. It currently contains information on over 58,000 books, 12,000 authors and 2000 series making it one of the largest online databases of author and book information. Unique features include finding historical publication information for books.
Registered users can catalog and manage their book collections online, find users with similar books. They can also rate and review books in addition to Tagging them. They can also rate authors and individual series. The rating system employs a 1-5 scale similar to Amazon's. Other features offered include showing random books from users catalogs on their websites, blogs or on their pages on social networking sites such as Zorpia or Myspace.
IBookDB also offers services to authors such as hosting their official forums for free, getting their books listed, updating their Bio and other book publicity services, providing a platform for authors and readers to connect. Currently IBookDB hosts the Official Forums for several authors, inluding Paul Levine, Susan McBride, Becky Garrison, Kristina O'Donnelly and Danielle Girard. In addition, IBookDB holds a monthly book giveaway, often with signed books, details of which are available on their website.
The Internet Book Database features one author and two books every month.
| Month | Featured Author |
|---|---|
| Nov. 2006 | Barry Eisler |
| Oct. 2006 | Kristina O'Donnelly |
| Sep. 2006 | Paul Levine |
| Aug. 2006 | Lee Child |
| Jul. 2006 | Danielle Girard |
| Jun. 2006 | Gayle Lynds |
[edit] Internet Book Database of Fiction
| URL | http://www.ibdof.com/<tr><th>Commercial?</th><td>No</td></tr> |
|---|---|
| Type of site | Online Book Database<tr><th>Registration</th><td>Optional</td></tr> |
| Owner | Kevin Palmer |
| Created by | <tr><th>Launched</th><td>March 2003</td></tr> |
- The Internet Book Database of Fiction
- The Internet Book Database of Fiction/Internet Book List Forums
The Internet Book Database of Fiction (IBDoF) is an online database for books, mostly works of fiction. The site also hosts a message board specifically geared to the discussion of books. The Database currently holds information for over 35800 books and 4730 authors, the community consists of roughly 1330 active members who have made 123500 forum posts in over 6400 topics.
Members of the IBDoF are able to and encouraged to add books and authors to the database as well as rate and write reviews on existing books. The Message board, which is now shared with the Internet Book List, includes discussion areas on some of the more popular authors in the database and also hosts official discussion boards for several authors including: Charles Pellegrino, L. E. Modesitt, Jack McDevitt, Lois McMaster Bujold, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (joint board), Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald (joint board), Heather Gladney, John Dalmas (writer of a book on the Great Northern War), and Elizabeth Bear.
[edit] Internet Book List
| URL | http://www.iblist.com/<tr><th>Commercial?</th><td>No</td></tr> |
|---|---|
| Type of site | Online Book Database<tr><th>Registration</th><td>Optional</td></tr> |
| Owner | Steven Jeffery |
| Created by | Patrik Roos<tr><th>Launched</th><td>March 2003</td></tr> |
The Internet Book List (IBList) is an online database with information about books, authors, short stories, etc. It is often called "the IMDb for books."
The project was started in 2003 by Patrik Roos. Later that year, Patrik transferred the site to Steven Jeffery, the present owner.
It currently contains information on over 48,000 books, 15,000 authors and 3500 series as well as over 3600 user reviews. The Message board, which is now shared with the Internet Book Database of Fiction, includes discussion areas on some of the more popular authors in the database and also hosts official discussion boards for several authors including: Charles Pellegrino, L. E. Modesitt, Jack McDevitt, Lois McMaster Bujold, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (joint board), Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald (joint board), Heather Gladney, John Dalmas (writer of a book on the Great Northern War), and Elizabeth Bear.
A rating system similar to that of IMDb allows registered users to rate books on a scale of 1 (really bad) to 10 (the best book you've ever read). This is employed to rank books, authors and series; in November, 2006, A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin is the overall number 1 ranked book. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien have received the most votes overall. Through a series of drop down menus users can also select the top rated book of their desired genre or sub-genre, and their choice of minimum votes. For example, as of 25 November 2006, Walden Two by B. F. Skinner is the top rated book in the All→Fiction→Science Fiction→Political→Dystopia/Utopia category with a minimum of 5 votes selected. It currently has a weighted rating of 8.62 from 5 votes.
Once a user is registered they are encouraged to apply to become an Editor. Once Editor status has been granted users are able add information to the database and edit existing entries.
[edit] Internet Speculative Fiction Database
| URL | http://www.isfdb.org<tr><th>Commercial?</th><td>No</td></tr> |
|---|---|
| Type of site | Online Book Database<tr><th>Registration</th><td>Optional</td></tr> |
| Owner | |
| Created by | <tr><th>Launched</th><td>September 1995</td></tr> |
The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is a database of bibliographic information on science fiction and related genres such as fantasy fiction and horror fiction. It is widely viewed as an authoritative source of information, and is constantly being updated. While its FAQs indicate that only a small fraction of authors and works have been cataloged by the site, in reality the ISFDB contains most of them. The database contains roughly 30,000 author entries tracking over 35,000 novels and 100,000 works of short fiction; by comparison, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (John Clute, Peter Nicholls, 1993) has roughly 2900 author entries.
The major strength of the ISFDB is its integrated approach to author information, combining variant titles, pseudonyms, series, and awards information into a single bibliography. It also contains the largest online collection of content listings to magazines published prior to 1984. Major alternatives to the ISFDB include:
- The Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards, edited by Mark R. Kelly.
- The Locus Index to Science Fiction, edited by William Contento. This site catalogs genre-related magazines, novels, anthologies, and collections published since 1984.
- Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections, edited by William Contento. This site catalogs genre-related anthologies and collections published prior to 1984.
- Internet Book List.
- Internet Book Database of Fiction
[edit] History
During the period of 1984-1994, a series of speculative fiction author bibliographies were posted to the Usenet newsgroup [1]. These were begun by Jerry Boyajian (1984-1986), continued by Gregory J.E. Rawlins (1985-1988), and then finally picked up by John Wenn (1988-1994). Over the lifetime of this series, a defacto bibliographic format evolved for SF-related authors. The bulk of these bibliographies still exist and can be found at The Linköping Science Fiction Archive.
In 1993, Al von Ruff created a database of awards information that could be searched via command line tools. These tools were modified to emit HTML and installed as Common Gateway Interface applications on a private web server. Over the course of 1993 and 1994, the awards database was fleshed out with data from the private database of David G. Grubbs. In 1994, John R. R. Leavitt created the Speculative Fiction Clearing House (SFCH), arguably the first SF-related portal on the Web. In late 1994, he asked for help in the creation of online tools that could display awards information, and the pre-ISFDB tools were offered for use there. Leavitt declined to use the tools, looking for something that could be integrated with other aspects of the site - such as magazine content listings.
In 1995, Al von Ruff began communicating with Ahasuerus (a prolific rec.arts.sf.written author) and began to construct the ISFDB, using lessons learned with the SFCH and the bibliographic format finalized by John Wenn. The ISFDB went online in September 1995, and a URL was published in January 1996.
Initially launched as a home page at a small ISP in Champaign, Illinois, the ISFDB suffered from limitations in disk space and database support that limited its growth. In October 1997 the ISFDB moved to SF Site, a major SF portal and review site. Due to the rising costs of remaining with SF Site, the ISFDB moved to its own domain in December 2002. The site was quickly shut down by the hosting ISP due to high resource usage. Soon afterwards, Texas A&M University responded by providing hosting for the ISFDB at a new address, www.isfdb.org.
Originally, the data and source code associated with the ISFDB was not available to the public, primarily due to disk space constraints. In May 2002, the source code was made available under the BSD license, while the datasets were made available under the OpenContent License, giving the site status as OSI Certified Open Source. On 27 February 2005, both the source code and the bibliographic data from the ISFDB was released under the Creative Commons Attribution License, and the OSI Certified Open Source designation was removed. Al von Ruff says that this change will not have much practical effect.
[edit] Contents
The ISFDB contains:
- Author bibliographies
- Publication bibliographies
- Award listings
- Magazine content listings
- Anthology and collection content listings
- Yearly fiction indexes
- Forthcoming books
- Numerical statistics of data contained in the database
- Graphed statistics of data contained in the database
- A discussion board
As of November 5, 2006, the ISFDB contains data on 36,343 authors, 27,006 awards and 179,085 titles (including 47,580 novels and 62,327 unique pieces of short fiction).
[edit] Social networking book databases
There are several databases intended primarily or partially for social networking. They encourage users to make their own catalogs, to rate the books on the site, and to use this information to identify others with similar interests.
[edit] LibraryThing
This is perhaps the largest and best known of the social book websites.
[edit] Reader2.com
This is another large social networking book website.
[edit] Consumer-oriented Databases
Typically dealing with many other things than books, and aimed primarily at selling books and other products.
[edit] AbeBooks
[edit] Amazon
[edit] bn.com
This is an online bookseller run by Barnes & Noble.
[edit] Play.com
[edit] Powell's Books
[edit] Compilations of other databases
[edit] ISBNdb.com
ISBNdb.com is a website that attempts to build a free database of books by querying various libraries across the world for book data. The results are then cross-indexed by a variety of parameters (authors, publishers, subjects, similarity, etc.) and are presented on the website in an organized format. Original MARC records are available for download as well..
As of May 2006, the site has data on more than 2 million unique ISBNs and corresponding books searchable by title, ISBN, author, subject, and other criteria. 2000-5000 records are added daily.
The ISBNdb.com website also offers book price comparison that searches for books availability and pricing in many online stores. Inclusion of large used book dealers (Abebooks, Alibris, Amazon, etc) allows it to effectively search the inventory of thousands of individual bookstores. Price comparisons at ISBNdb.com are unique in a way that book pricing is displayed almost instantaneously, in parallel to normal book browsing.
Effective July 2005, ISBNdb.com offers an XML based remote access API that allows access to all of the same data that is displayed on the website itself.
ISBNdb.com was started in 2001 as a hobby project by Andrew Maltsev. it is now a project of his company, Ejelta LLC.
[edit] Journal and magazine article databases
[edit] General
[edit] Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature
[edit] Proquest
[edit] Web of Knowledge
This large scale database can be used for finding journal articles by subject, but it can also be used as a Citation database, for finding newer journal articles that site known previously published journal articles. It covers science, social science, and Humanities, and is found mainly in large university and other research libraries.
[edit] Scopus
This large scale database can be used for finding journal articles by subject, but it can also be used as a Citation database, for finding newer journal articles that site known previously published journal articles. It covers science and social science, and is found mainly in university and other academic libraries.
[edit] Subject-specific
[edit] Education Resources Information Center (ERIC)
This database, prepared by the U.S. Department of Education, lists journal articles and other materials pertinent to the field of education, interpreted very broadly.
