[thrdbndndn]

Probably totally digress, but I wish IA can organize their digital library slightly better.

One day I was checking some manga books by ISBN on IA just out of curiosity. And for some reason, it put the ISBNs for all the volumes of a manga into one single entry (https://archive.org/details/isbn_1919979003907, check "ISBN" metadata section) and unsurprisingly, the actual content is only one volume, vol.43 (not even vol.1!). I have a feeling other volumes may exist somewhere there, but there is no way to search for them.

This isn't a one-off occurrence either, it reflects my experience for trying to find specific item there well, especially for non-English books.

[textfiles]

On a given day I'm moving tens of thousands of items around to make them easier to find. I'm sure I'll get to your section sooner or later.

[jrajav]

Are you involved with IA? I'm actually really interested in what your day to day looks like, could you share more?

[coderintherye]

Jason's day-to-day is pretty well covered in his Twitter account: https://twitter.com/textfiles

[Wingy]

textfiles is Jason Scott[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott

[mdp2021]

And since we are there, K. Savetz (submitter) is "manager of special collections at Internet Archive".

[throwaway742]

Thank you for your service.

[textfiles]

Every day is a joy.

[giantrobot]

A lot of the time the metadata accuracy is up to the original uploader. IA's upload system doesn't magically fill in all the metadata details for an item.

[adhesive_wombat]

Also doesn't allow other to update metadata or even submit for review.

Wikidata has a property for Internet Archive ID, so it wouldn't be conceptually hard to construct a parallel metadata store there, but it would involve hundreds of millions of triples so it's definitely "hard" in other senses.

[mdp2021]

While I also wish the Archive to be more precise - e.g. in the "Author" and in the "Year of publication" fields -,

I suggest that you check their RSS feeds to see how staggeringly high the rate of uploads is. That uploading is "frenetic" (in a good way of course) reveals where the focus is. For re-assessing and fixing the records a parallel team would probably be needed.

I would gladly help towards that: I never checked but maybe one can volunteer.

[JKCalhoun]

I agree. I had wondered how successful and easy it would be to create a "front end" site that does a better job of searching, organizing archive.org.