On 20/03/07, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
-1 for HELL NO.
There are many cases where the amazon (.com, .co.uk, .de and .fr are different) contain metadata that simply is not available in other accessible catalogs. [[James Hanratty]] has an example. People understandably get a bit stroppy when you try to remove these amazon links unless you can find a better catalogue to use for verification.
But the thing is... why not just say
Jean Justice. "Le Crime de la Route A6". Laffont, 1968.
Not everything has to have a weblink next to it... why does it need to be "verified"? All that does is confirm the purported source exists; it doesn't actually give us any help in confirming the content of the source.
If you want better metadata than the fragment on the Amazon site, you can get it out of the BNF catalogue easily enough - it took me, with my patchy French, two minutes to find...
Jean Justice. Le Crime de la route A6 [Texte imprimé][″Murder versus murder″]. Traduction et présentation de Claude Mourthé. - Paris : R. Laffont, 1968. - In-16 (20 cm), 343 p., carte, pl., couv. ill. 19,50 F. [D. L. 2867-68].
...but you can't give it a fixed URL, so I guess it may as well not exist. Catalogue number is FRBNF33059758 ;-)
In the mean time, we can vet the use of amazon links to see if they can be replaced with links to international catalogue numbers that are built to be more stable, _where possible_. It wont take long; a team
I think the problem here, to my eyes - and speaking as a librarian - is that *there is no reason to insist on catalogue numbers*. They're icing on the cake; they are not needed to find a work, and never have been. Trying to insist on keeping one which has active *defects* when we can simply lift the bib data to cite the work conventionally just seems to be futile...