Re-using recordings / catalog search

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annise
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Post by annise »

I tried "Ulalume Poe" - the poem by Poe which is in a collection here and individually searchable. It did not come up in the first 6 pages of my Google search.
If you add librivox to the search it does - and it adds the youtube one/s too :D

Anne
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Post by TriciaG »

Yeah, but if you did that with "The Luck of Edenhall" it pulls up the LV version of that, too, which wasn't Michele's argument. :) If I read her right, she wants them to come up without specifying "LibriVox".
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Post by ej400 »

Availle wrote: April 19th, 2019, 9:57 am I think Elijah means "same recordings in different projects". :wink: And thank you Elijah, for making my point so eloquently! :wink:
That's exactly what I meant, thank you for correcting it! But yes, I think it would be a shame if we were helping our search results... but finding out that in all 6 versions, the same person reads Chapter 1-5 (of 6 total Chapters) ((For example)).
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Post by silverquill »

Interesting discussion spilling over several areas.

So, let me ask about several scenarios.

1). I record a poem in a collection by a single author, group project. I really like this poem and want to give it some exposure (since I guess it is not searchable by title within the group project, but mainly because i just like the poem). Can I submit the same recording to a monthly short poetry collection? If not, can I submit the same poem if I make a new recording?

If the issue is getting credit twice, in the first instance, for doing the work of just one recording, then that seems to me a rather weak reason for a policy. Who is doing this to pad one's statistics anyway? And does it harm others or LV if this is done? The potential for some sort of abuse exists, I suppose, but seems remote. And, I suppose some listener might be disappointed to find the same recording in two separate projects. Still seems remote.

Doing a fresh recording for another project obviates the argument of somehow benefiting from duplicate submissions, but the potential for abuse is still remotely there, and a listener could still be disappointed to find the same reader in more than one project and probably couldn't tell if it was the same recording or a different one.

To be clear, I do agree with and support the current LV policy in this regard -- just trying to understand the reasons.

2). This question is about collections. Gutenberg has put up individual stories from the science fiction magazines from the "golden era." Mags like Amazing Stories, If, etc. Could there be a project that draws together these stories, say six stories by a particular author, or seven stories themed around the planet Mars, etc.? (If so, I assume the individual stories would be searchable.)
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Post by annise »

answer 1 - no you can't submit the same recording, yes you can rerecord it and submit it - I don't remember it happening with a poem but there certainly are people who have read a chapter in a group project and have enjoyed the read and felt they had something to offer by reading the project as a Solo

re 2 - Phil has made his own collection of various Sci Fi stories , usually by the same author. PG was releasing the magazines as a whole, we have a number of complete Astounding Stories but doubts were raised at PG about the copyright status, so they stopped and are releasing single stories.
But you can make up your own collection, people usually have a theme for the collection, even if it's only " My Favourite ........" .

Anne
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Post by Availle »

Good evening, I'm back after a good night's sleep and a lovely Saturday. It's finally getting warmer here! :D

If you don't mind, could you please take a step back while I'm having intelligent discourse with William about our search function? Thanks. :thumbs:
Cheers, Ava.
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Availle
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Post by Availle »

Hi there William and thanks for your patience :mrgreen:

Looking at your post from above, I don't want to comment about the first paragraph, really. I don't think a websearch is a good example. I don't know how google etc. organise their databases, but I would assume that there are plenty of redundancies and multiple entries in the databases that come in simply because of how a webcrawl is done. When they then report the findings, surely those redundancies come into play and you will find a number of results pointing to the same website (even though that might be a different entry in the database). I'm assuming a lot here, I have no idea, so that's why I don't want to get into this.

So, our database has unique entries that are essentially manually added whenever a project is started, and each project/catalog page leads to a unique project number in the database. There are no redundancies built into the thing per se and I don't think that adding redundancies will fix the bugs and peculiarities that are in the search function.


In your second paragraph, you're (almost) asking the question: "Why can I find SOME sections with a certain title, but not all of them?"

The toggle you're suggesting is already implemented, it's a checkbox whether a project is classified as a collection or not. If YES, then the following two things happen:

1) We now have additional metadata for each section that can be filled in manually and covers "section author, link to section text, section language (that's for multilingual projects, default is project language)". Together with the section title, this meta data is now fully searchable.
2) On the catalog page, this additional metadata is displayed for each section. To see how this looks like, compare a
standard book project: https://librivox.org/las-criaturas-acuaticas-by-charles-kingsley/ with a
collection project: https://librivox.org/short-nonfiction-collection-vol-063-by-various/


As to "when is something a collection" and thus searchable by section:
Essentially, if it has been published as a single book, and the project is the same as this one single book, then we have a standard project and no collection. (e.g., https://librivox.org/collected-poems-1901-1918-by-walter-de-la-mare/)
In contrast, if the project is made up of a number of individual sections that were published individually, possibly but not necessarily by different authors, and taken from different text sources, then we call it a collection and catalog as such. (e.g., https://librivox.org/37-american-poems-by-various/)

In essence, we try to emulate what you would find in a standard library catalog. If you were to look there for, say, a particular story by Poe, it would not show up in a search of the library catalog (unless it comes up in the title of a book). Instead, you would have to look for Poe and check inside individual books.
In a sense, we are already doing better than that, because we do index collections "produced" by LibriVox by section and not just by overall title.


For now, I'm leaving it at this explanation of what we're doing right now. There are other issues with the search, but let's start small. :D
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Post by williamjones »

DACSoft wrote: April 19th, 2019, 11:17 am
TriciaG wrote: April 19th, 2019, 10:24 am Regarding reusing recordings...

... I am heartily against reusing files.
I wholeheartedly agree! My justification was along the lines of your last bullet point, although my example was a book of short stories. Suppose I solo such a book with 20 stories. Then I decide I want to extract the 20 stories and apply them as 20 contributions to various short story collections. I've done almost no additional work, but now have contributed to 21 projects (the equivalent of 40 "chapters" with only 20 recordings)!

To me this feels like "cheating," and diminishes the time and value of the work that others spend in recording 40 "chapters" for 21 projects. I fully support the restrictions of not reusing recording files at LV. :thumbs:

Don
What's going on here?!?!?! Don, TriciaG, we're not in high school anymore and trying to earn patches and badges to wear on Boy/Girl Scout uniforms. Are we? Are YOU? Concern over your personal COUNTS sounds like someone who is try to bolster their ego. Surely that's not you, is it? The LV Prime Directive doesn't speak to earning bragging points, I'm pretty sure. To bring up such concerns is not worthy of your considerable reputations. Lop of this branch of specious reasoning, please.
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Post by moniaqua »

williamjones wrote: April 20th, 2019, 5:50 am Don, TriciaG, we're not in high school anymore and trying to earn patches and badges to wear on Boy/Girl Scout uniforms. Are we? Are YOU?
You aren't, I am not, I bet Tricia and Don aren't. But for sure there are volunteers who aim for that. I've noticed such attitude. And yes, I feel there is no such directive, too :)
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Post by annise »

Ok, let's put it another way - does filling the catalogue with exact copies of the same recording help us with our prime directive?
It doesn't.

Anne
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Post by williamjones »

Availle wrote: April 20th, 2019, 2:21 am Hi there William and thanks for your patience :mrgreen:

Looking at your post from above, I don't want to comment about the first paragraph, really. I don't think a websearch is a good example. I don't know how google etc. organise their databases, but I would assume that there are plenty of redundancies and multiple entries in the databases that come in simply because of how a webcrawl is done. When they then report the findings, surely those redundancies come into play and you will find a number of results pointing to the same website (even though that might be a different entry in the database). I'm assuming a lot here, I have no idea, so that's why I don't want to get into this.

<snip>

The toggle you're suggesting is already implemented, it's a checkbox <how is this accessible?> whether a project is classified as a collection or not. If YES, then the following two things happen:

<snip>

In a sense, we are already doing better than that, because we do index collections "produced" by LibriVox by section and not just by overall title.
<Great news!>
Great info here! Thanks.
You mentioned "webcrawl" in your first paragraph and "card catalog" soon thereafter. Allow me to remark that "walking the tree" of a relational database is a different algorithm from either of those other activities.

I am delighted to learn that the toggle that I hypothesized does in fact exist: Collection or Standard Book (i.e., non-Collection). The inherent difference between these two types of project is the interdependence of the contained sections. In a Standard Book each section/chapter unwinds more of the story's progress and is interconnected with the preceding and subsequent sections. However, in a Collection each section has its own start, middle and ending... i.e., is independent.

Can this be done:
I am BCing a project ("The Complete Works of Brann The Iconoclast Volume 1"), each of section of which is an independent newspaper article written by William Cowper Brann in his own newspaper, "The Iconoclast". Please, classify this project as a COLLECTION. Can you or Lynnet do this for me? As Captain Kirk might say: "Set your phazers to COLLECTION!"

Thank you in advance.
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Post by TriciaG »

williamjones wrote: April 20th, 2019, 5:50 am
What's going on here?!?!?! Don, TriciaG, we're not in high school anymore and trying to earn patches and badges to wear on Boy/Girl Scout uniforms. Are we? Are YOU? Concern over your personal COUNTS sounds like someone who is try to bolster their ego. Surely that's not you, is it? The LV Prime Directive doesn't speak to earning bragging points, I'm pretty sure. To bring up such concerns is not worthy of your considerable reputations. Lop of this branch of specious reasoning, please.
I didn't say it was a concern for me personally. I said it was one of my "top-of-the-head questions/comments" to this topic. (That said, I AM proud of the amount I've recorded, and I do wonder where I stand relative to others. At one time I think I was #3, but then that stat functionality went away, so I no longer know. So maybe I AM sometimes thinking about my girl scout badge. So what?)

But if we as an entity say we have "over 12,000 audiobooks," would that really be true if in future we reused recordings? And would not a listener be disappointed if they heard the exact same recording multiple times?

Originally, we did not allow the same chapter/poem/story by the same reader, period. Even a re-recording. The allowance of a reader to do a new recording was a concession, for the reason Annise mentioned. It has happened that someone records section(s) for a group project, then discovered they like it so much, they wanted to do the whole work as a solo. We could have said, "You recorded a chapter of that book already. We can't take it out of the group project, so you're out of luck on doing the whole book as a solo, because we don't allow the same chapter/poem/story to be in the catalog more than once by the same reader." That was the original policy, but because of the circumstance, we loosened the restriction such that we'll allow a whole new recording of it by the same reader. It seems like a technical distinction, and perhaps it is. But it's something. We can honestly say that all our recordings are unique; none are reused and simply repackaged. And it advances our prime directive: there was then a new solo recording of that work.

And I do not see us changing the policy to reuse recordings. There is no compelling reason to do so. The search functionality issue doesn't advance the argument - and if it did, I'm not sure it would tip any scale, anyway.

(The above is all IMHO, but I'd bet money on the last paragraph.)
I am delighted to learn that the toggle that I hypothesized does in fact exist: Collection or Standard Book (i.e., non-Collection). The inherent difference between these two types of project is the interdependence of the contained sections. In a Standard Book each section/chapter unwinds more of the story's progress and is interconnected with the preceding and subsequent sections. However, in a Collection each section has its own start, middle and ending... i.e., is independent.
LibriVox's definition of a "collection" is a project with multiple text sources, and (sometimes) multiple authors. It is to be able to cite the different text sources, not simply for search functionality. So no, your Iconoclast project is not a LV collection.
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Post by williamjones »

annise wrote: April 20th, 2019, 6:01 am Ok, let's put it another way - does filling the catalogue with exact copies of the same recording help us with our prime directive?
It doesn't.

Anne
"...filling the catalogue..." Filling? :D Do let's avoid hyperbole in serious discussion.

And, YES, allowing cross-posting of a recording in different Collections DOES assist in the Prime Directive: In one context (=project) browsing users will share common interests; while in another context, there will be different users with different interests -- thus the audience for a recording is expanded. Q.E.D.
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Post by TriciaG »

Audience is not part of our prime directive.
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Post by Availle »

williamjones wrote: April 20th, 2019, 6:38 am Great info here! Thanks.
You mentioned "webcrawl" in your first paragraph and "card catalog" soon thereafter. Allow me to remark that "walking the tree" of a relational database is a different algorithm from either of those other activities.
I am aware of that. But the data to be entered into the database has to come from somewhere, and for google's databases I would expect them to come from a webcrawl :wink: As I said, I am not familiar with google's intricacies, which are different than ours, so let's not go there.
Can this be done:
I am BCing a project ("The Complete Works of Brann The Iconoclast Volume 1"), each of section of which is an independent newspaper article written by William Cowper Brann in his own newspaper, "The Iconoclast". Please, classify this project as a COLLECTION.
Technically, yes.

Practically no since you are not reading from the individual, original newspaper articles piece by piece but from a single source already collecting them all. In this sense, the sections are not different than any titled chapters in a book, even though I get that they are independent, as in many of our other "collected nonfiction essays by..." .

{Deleted final paragraph because the technical issue I alluded to seems to have been fixed / is slightly different than I described. Sorry. }
Cheers, Ava.
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