User talk:M3lo

Welcome, !

Come introduce yourself at the new users page. If you have any questions, you can ask there or contact me personally. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 01:14, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Re:Comments on law organization
Sorry about the delay in responding to you. You left a very long message and I wanted to make sure that I read and understood it all before i said anything. Don't want to put my foot in my mouth!

First off, our organizational needs right now do extend to our entire book collection, a collection which is probably around 1000 books currently (that's a rough estimate). The problem with our books is that they don't qualify as what are traditionally called "books", and don't have things like stable versions, ISBN numbers, etc. However, starting off with our Law books is as good a place as any, and considering that Law is one of our smaller bookshelves, it would serve as a great prototype for other, larger, bookshelves.

As to your question about who uses these books, I would say that the answer is "all of the above". Each book defines it's own target audience, so on the Law bookshelf there will be books for lay people, lawyers, judges, students, etc. This is part of our organizational problem, that the books we have really do span the entire spectrum.

When we talk about our goals, we do realize that we dont have all the materials that larger online collections will have. Our goals are more humble, we just want to provide free materials for students who have previously been forced to buy them. To that extent, we can assume that any materials that are already freely available don't need to be duplicated here. However, another type of material here is to take preexisting materials and make them more readable and more accessible.

Even if we just focus on the Law bookshelf, what kinds of organizational steps do you recommend? Should we create 6 pages for the 6 types of materials, even if there is a good chance that many of those materials will never be hosted here? Should be use LC to try and keep them organized, even if it's a lousy system? Is there a different way entirely? Let's go off the assumption that we can use multiple systems in parallel with one another. For instance, we already have all the books categorized according to Dewey and LC (to varying degrees of success), and the books all already appear on the Law bookshelf. Is there anything else that we need to add? And for that matter, are we using the Dewey, LC, and bookshelf methods appropriately?

Or, let me put it to you in a different way: looking at what we have, perhaps guessing at what our potential is in the long-term, what would you do if you had complete authority? If you got to organize these materials as you saw fit, to be the most useful to the most number of people, how would you do it? Keep in mind that through the software we can put books in multiple places simultaneously, on multiple bookshelves, in multiple listings. Absolute redundency. How would you do it? --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:01, 31 July 2007 (UTC)