On 19 August 2011 17:59, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
Hang on - much as I love the DNB, there is huge amount
to know before
saying spending money on it would be a good use. There are literally
hundreds of Google Books keys for DNB volumes, some of which don't work
in the UK but do work in the USA, etc.
To quickly follow up, there's also the complicating factor that not
all DNB articles are public domain - at least, not outside the US,
which isn't an issue for WM proper but is for us! Almost everything in
the 1885 publication is *likely* to be PD - unless the contributors
were very precocious junior academics - but the DNB included more
recent content (supplementary volumes published every ten years or so)
and those are a real minefield involving individual author dates. OED
do have the metadata to figure this out on a life+70 basis, but it
might not be trivial for them.
(It's also not clear if the versions published on the ODNB website are
themselves the "clean" versions - they may have been tidied up, etc,
which muddies the waters a little.)
Do we have a central list of DNB volumes for which WS does not have
scans? I'm happy to spend an hour digging through Google Books / OL /
etc...
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk