Metadata(less) and other bibliographical/biographical adventures
1. So far this evening, GoogleBooks has reported that "J. A. Heraud" was "James Abraham Heraud" (no, that's his father; the Heraud in question is John, as GoogleBooks notes elsewhere); listed a date for a periodical that was several years off from the actual digitized volume; confused John Wilson Foster's Irish Novels 1890-1940 with Helen J. Swift's Gender, Writing, and Performance: Men Defending Women in Late Medieval France (how the heck...?!); and insisted that the Eighty-Fifth Annual Report of the Religious Tract Society was the fifty-first. GoogleBooks is, of course, an enormously useful resource, without which I absolutely could not do my research, but I wish they would stop talking about how they're going to do some quality control, and actually, you know, do some quality control. I understand that nobody is going to catch the name of a now-obscure Victorian dramatist/editor/poet/biographer/literary critic, but the other problems could be corrected by using a real, live, honest-to-goodness person to match the title page to the metadata.
2. Still, to give GoogleBooks some props when due, I've recently found some cool information that I never would have known existed otherwise (like A.L.O.E's Daybreak in Britain being translated into Bengali [and, following this up on WorldCat, Urdu as well], the appropriation of an Anglican poem for the late-Victorian Catholic canon, and a report of Dean Farrar citing Romola in an apparently unpublished lecture about Savonarola).
3. Although it would be nice if GoogleBooks would quit orphaning multi-volume novels.
4. Speaking of A.L.O.E.--for non-Victorianists, that's "A Lady of England," the pseudonym of Charlotte Maria Tucker--was any pseudonym less suited to the computer age? Do you know what you get when you have to run a search for A.L.O.E.? That's right--you get a lot of aloe.
Clearly, A.L.O.E. didn't have the convenience of early twenty-first century academics in mind.
5. Still speaking of A.L.O.E. and Daybreak in Britain, I forgot to mention one academic "nightmare" in my earlier post: confusing a single work released under multiple titles with multiple works. Daybreak in Britain had four different titles, some of which only appeared when the novel was reprinted in the USA. (All of them have "Daybreak in Britain" as part of the title, though.)
6. As character names go, "Chrysostomos Holton" is definitely...different.
7. Emily Sarah Holt was profiled in Half-Hours with Representative Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (1927), eh? That's interesting. (It will be even more interesting when I can actually see what the author had to say about her.)