Just thinking out loud: I wonder if there is a way to crowd-source correction of such metadata.

As all of us who have used Archive.org know, finding things is often a real matter of hit and miss, since so many things are put up with either wrong or horribly incomplete data. Moreover, one of the first things I noticed in the Canadian data is that there seem to be cases where all the diacritical letters in a title have either disappeared, or simply do not appear on screen -- I didn't do any systematic sort of survey. But the resources are wonderful and often really crucial for us, most especially in this lockdown situation, so it would be a positive thing if there were a way to make the resource better.

(Another) Jonathan

On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 8:23 PM Jonathan Peterson via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:

The University of Toronto’s library system has contributed nearly 215,000 titles from their collections to the Internet Archive project. The library has devoted a sizable area of the John P. Robarts Library's 7th floor to the ongoing scanning and digitization of material. Curious about metadata problems with their digitized Sanskrit collection, I spoke a few years ago to a librarian who liaises between Robarts and Internet Archive. If I recall correctly, they mentioned that the metadata for their digital collection on Archive.org is drawn directly from the UToronto library system itself. Due to staffing, budget, and expertise constraints, there is little scope for correcting metadata on a mass scale. Doing so, they emphasized, would require a cumbersome process of first correcting data on library-side AACR2/RDA listings, which would then be used to update Archive.org.

With best wishes,

Jonathan Peterson

University of Toronto

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