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Contents 1 rasfw 2 Misc 3 Bibliographies 4 Reviews database 5 Being reviewed Database 6 Being Published Database 6.1 Requirement 6.2 Components 6.3 Database Schema 7 Book Database 8 ISFDB 9 Filk 10 XML 11 IT At Conventions

rasfw

DelCotter and AlexMcLintock set up a system for downloading the headers for the Rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup weekly. This was then analysed by Del.

However this system got broken and not restarted - possibly because the machine being switched off.

This is a Dead project which is not being worked on....

Misc

• Book_Review_Database: cataloguing every book review on the internet (by using Google and analysing the results)
• providing web assistance with special events like the SF & Fantasy Art Exhibition in Foyles bookshop.
• storing author bibliographies in an easily updatable way.
• keeping an eye on rec.arts.sf.written through DelCotter's newsgroup statistics
• helping authors set up blog type journals on their own sites
• creating a new LiveJournal Blog for authors and book fans
• providing email lists similar to YahooGroups (but without the drawbacks of Yahoo!)
• publicising public events (book launches, signings, exhibitions etc)
• cataloguing student SF societies so that they can find each other more easily
• listing and reviewing second hand bookshops
• a catalogue of people willing to talk to the media about Science Fiction
• assisting with internet Publicity for SF websites and events

A number of tasks are related to keeping this site running

• Setting up a new DNS server (or moving sites to another DNS server)
• Setting up a mail server

Bibliographies

DiverseBooks has started to store author Bibliographies. The first two we have started on were compiled by AdamCorres. Adam is preparing an Excel Spreadsheet which is uploaded by AlexMcLintock and converted to html by some perl code. This process could be more automated.

• Terry Pratchett's Bibliography http://news.diversebooks.com/article.pl?sid=03/03/30/1712230&mode=thread
• Evelyn Waugh Bibliography http://news.diversebooks.com/article.pl?sid=03/05/21/2156253&mode=thread

AlexMcLintock set up a system whereby experts in a particular author can edit Excel spreadsheets to list their bibliographies and these can be automatically converted to web pages.

This happens off line in a machine at Alex's house and there are lots of opportunities to improve this.

The current code is in perl.

Reviews database

We already have a reviews database of sorts. It stores *pointers* to reviews, rather than the whole reviews. It concentrates mostly on internal reviews stored within the DiverseBooks system - but can store external reviews. What it doesn't do - is link to the new author/title sfbooks database.

http://news.diversebooks.com/metadata/

Being reviewed Database

We currently have an Excel spreadsheet of what books are out with whom - but I would prefer this to be online and available to DiverseBooks code. We could add in functions to email people periodically and most importantly pre-populate a review submission form with information about the book being reviewed - thus saving the reviewer a lot of time, and improving quality of the review.

Being Published Database

Requirement

• Store and distribute a database of Books (mostly SF for now) which are being published in the UK.
• Data is to be entered from paper press releases. Ideally we offer this electronic conversion and distribution as a service to publishers - which we *charge* for.

• At the very least we should be able to present forthcoming books to the DiverseBooks.com website, and other interested websites, such as ISFDB.
• Ideally we read the same data from the ISFDB - but for US publications which are of course available to UK consumers through amazon.com
• Data entered this way may be fed back to BernardPeek so that he can update his database of SF books.
• Need to store computing books and other topics as well as sf.

Components

We are essentially talking about a Relational database - probably MySQL sitting on the klute box (this one).

There may be a number of data feed programs and data extraction programs but lets define those as we go :-)

Database Schema

• We need the same author table (or a copy of it if absolutely unavoidable) since we want to have the *same* authornumbers used.
• We don't currently have any publisher information - but I think we need it now.
• I would like to associate a publisher with a bunch of authors for ease of entering data.
• We probably need all the fields in the titles table - but not necessarily store our data *in* the same table. Since this data needs to be fed back to BernardPeek - and he *generates* the titles table I think we should copy the schema - and have a separate table. (The alternative is to enter stuff into the same table but to add a new column saying "this is a new title"). (How do we cope with title numbers?)
• We unfortunately now need a "publication" table which maps a title (which is virtual) to a particular paper edition. This will have to include things like ISBN, price, format, and so on. (hint - look at ONIX for some of the fields - but most importantly look at press releases to see what they specify).

Book Database

Book Database

ISFDB

The Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase at http://isfdb.tamu.edu/ <p> GopherIt team members with logon access to the Klute box can have a look at the raw ascii data files here <p> /home/sflink.net/isfdb/ <p> I (AlexMcLintock) would be interested in converting most of this data into a relational database. Has anyone done this?

JohnBray copied the files back to vicarage but cannot compile the tools, as a trivial make gives errors about O_BINARY. Have not investigated further.

AlexMcLintock suggests that we don't bother too much investigating the ISFDB tools. There is an SQL version planned - and we dont expect to do much sharing of data with the ISFDB. I am hoping to do one thing for them though: through the Book Database record the SF books being published in the UK. We have quite a few publishers sending us press releases about this and AFAIK there is no place to find this info easily.

Al von Ruff asks: Since we're all in the middle of either converting existing databases to a relational one (or creating new databases altogether), wouldn't it make sense to come up with a reasonably common schema in order to make data exchange more easy? Is there some way we can align goals, or at least document what you think the shortcomings of the ISFDB are?

Filk

There is a 100 person newsletter run by Rafe Culpin. Rafe who be quite happy to help other filkers or possibly offer advice to others with their newsletter systems. He would also like help maintaining the data for his filk newsletter.

XML

XML is a structured way of recording tree like data - such as the full text of a poem, book review, or novel. This is different from tabular data stored in a RDBMS.

Projects involving XML include

• Creating an XML schema for recording a convention programme
• Teaching web site owners about RDF and RSS
• creating an XML schema for exchanging book reviews and telling us about them.
• (Professional) teaching publishers about ONIX - the XML for describing published books.

SF Fans who know about XML include: MartinEasterbrook, SimonBisson, AlexMcLintock,

IT At Conventions

IT At Conventions