posted
I've been befuddled by this in the past. Amazon's listings aren't complete, they often don't include out-of-print books. My library does its best, but there's just no telling whether they have all of an author's titles. Is there a way to search the Library of Congress to list all titles by a specific author? Am I right in remembering that for US titles, at least, the Library of Congress might be the definitive listing?
posted
google, my young apprentice. google and yahoo are your greatest weapons. you must use them accordingly.
Posts: 240 | Registered: Oct 2005
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posted
Google will give me 999,038 hits, 999,033 of which have useful, but incomplete information. What search terms? "Robert A. Heinlein complete catalog"? (I know, silly example as the author has a foundation complete with website and likely a catalog, but you get the idea...)
Wikipedia makes a good effort, but is far from the definitive guide. Isn't there somewhere that is a central repository for this kind of thing?
posted
The British Library receives and catalogues a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland. That includes books, magazines, professional journals and no doubt more. http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/quickinfo/facts/index.html
I'm fairly sure you're right, KayTi, in believing that the US Library of Congress does the same thing in America and would be definitive for all things published in the USA.
But the British Library catalogue does not appear to include the short stories (I looked for Heinlein's “The Roads must Roll” and could not find it) because they were published in mags and anthologies, and the catalogue is organized by publication.
So the Library of Congress and the British Library give good lists but still incomplete. I guess you'll have to wait for Google to index life, the universe and everything ...
posted
We were just using Heinlein as a test example. Googling "AuthorName bibliography" isn't a general solution. It only works for well-known authors like The Master, or writers in which someone has taken a deep interest.
posted
Most writers have their own websites--if they're still publishing--and they have a list of their works. If it's an obscure, out-of-print author, I don't know...obscurity being the key word. Most others, you can find through the internet, given the right searches.
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited November 28, 2008).]
posted
I am with babbler here. Even deceased authors typically have websites run by heirs to their estate. That would be step one. Which autor are you looking for specifically?
Posts: 1888 | Registered: Jan 2008
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posted
It just seemed to me an insult to KayTi's not inconsiderable intelligence to say "Google it", but I tried to find an obscure author, one who wrote a series of SF stories that I read as a kid. They were about Kemlo, that's all I can remember, and sure enough, Google turns up two or three results and some seemingly complete lists of the author's works--apparently, I'm not the only one who enjoyed them.
posted
I tried Googling a couple of writers---one obscure (but mentioned here in the last couple of days), and one even more so.
"[name of writer]" +"complete works" +list
For Writer #1, I got several listings for the Complete Works of William Shakespeare to which the writer's name was somehow attached. For Writer #2 I got absolutely nothing.
Other variations might produce a list, but I'd have to think of them first.
So, unless there's a dedicated fan or fan-base, willing to compile a list and put it up for free, you probably won't find much on older and obscure writers...at least not through Google...
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Sidebar thought: somebody or other compiled this list of genre magazines and their contents. The list selection is odd---for one thing, they don't list every issue of every magazine---but I've found that my own name comes up in it, 'cause of a letter published in one magazine back in the late 1970s. Comes up nearly every time I ego-search.
I think that's the kind of thing you're most likely to get online. You may get something, but you might get something incomplete...
posted
TS, I think by now KayTi knows I have considerable respect for her, both as a writer and a friend. If I feared she'd take it that way, I wouldn't have replied. My reply was in the manner of a mechanic checking a vehicle over: start with the easy--possibly overlooked--stuff first. She mentioned Amazon and the LoC, but when the "Google suggestion was put forth, sha asked:
quote:What search terms? "Robert A. Heinlein complete catalog"?
posted
Aww, Pat thinks I have not inconsiderable intelligence.
I have always wondered about this (since back when I discovered Heinlein in my teens and exhausted the school library's collection long before I exhausted his complete works,) but it came to mind when I was searching my library's listings for works by Joseph Campbell. I found several redundant listings, some different media (DVD of a documentary on his work - two different versions, CD audio recording of a specific book, CD audio recording of a different book), and nowhere just a simple list of his published books.
So it got me to wondering. Then I was looking (also in my 30k person town library's catalog) for Robin McKinley. So I used her as a google test case using search terms Robin+McKinley+bibliography (I did not use quotes to encase any of the terms.) The first few hits are useful-ish, but still there's a discrepancy. The wikipedia article about her has something like 16 books listed. Her personal website lists 14 I believe (or something different and less than the wikipedia article.)
Now, I didn't dig and dig, perhaps the information is there on one of the pages or on one of the links from the wikipedia article. The premise of my googling in this case is to quickly find the information I need by getting close with the search terms, scanning the results, choosing 2-5 of the links, going to them, scanning the pages and identifying the information I am looking for. This is how I google in general (and by the way, am I not the only one who thinks it's really funny to have a company name turned into a verb?) and I expect that I can quickly find information I want through this kind of searching.
So - because my results thus far have not given me exactly what I wanted, I thought I'd ask. For those who are googling - what search terms are you using? Are you using the author's name in quotes? Are you searching on bibliography? Complete works? list of works? Are you quoting those terms so that those words must appear together in the hits?
posted
Oh, and wouldbe's ISBNdb.com is an interesting link, but because it's an index by ISBN number, which each particular edition of a book will have a unique one, there are many redundancies (for instance I count 9 versions of her book called "Beauty")
posted
KayTi said: "So I used her as a google test case using search terms Robin+McKinley+bibliography (I did not use quotes to encase any of the terms.)"
You might want to try "Robin McKinley" in double quotes like I did here too. Since both "Robin" and "McKinley" are pretty common names, if you don't quote them together you'll get all the sites that have "Robin" and "McKinley" even if the two words are referring to different people, and are 500 words apart from each other.
posted
Thanks Eric - that's a good site to keep track of, I hadn't come across it before.
Thanks to everyone else. I'm relieved to see there isn't one definitive answer that I was just missing. It seems a combination of looking at some good sites, effective googling, and using your own best judgment when looking at lists is about as good as it's going to get.
posted
Well, that is, until the Internet AI wakes up and takes over the mundane tasks of organizing information for us. Of course. Posts: 1911 | Registered: Mar 2007
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posted
Having worked in a library, I know that there is a collection of reference books (I think by Gale, but I can't remember now) that lists exactly what you want. Call the reference desk at your closest large library, and explain what you want and the reference librarian should be able to provide it.
posted
I think you're thinking of Books in Print. Haven't looked into a copy in decades, but, from my poking around, I knew they had plenty, but they didn't have everything. The volumes are still being published, aren't they?
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posted
No, it's not Books in Print, but a collection of biographies and bibliographies of authors. Libraries keep it in their reference section, so they can't be checked out. I think it's called Contemporary Authors, but I'm not sure.
It also contains some reviews of an author's works, if I remember correctly.
posted
Oh, yeah, right. Books in Print was in orange-ish covers...Contemporary Authors, if that was the name (I don't remember, either), came in green covers. You could find the latter at the public libraries...but it's been some years since I've been, and, besides, in this day and age, who knows what's online or on DVD or CD-ROM or whatever?
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