Quote:
Originally Posted by vivaldirules
Well, I'm going to have to give up before I've really started. I spent three hours and am not through the "A" authors.
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Yip, it did sound like a pretty overwhelming task...
Getting the Patricia Clark library 100% life+70 compliant sounds like an impossible dream. However, as long as Alex can show that a reasonable, good-faith effort has been made to purge non-compliant books, and that valid requests to remove non-compliant books are promptly fulfilled, I believe the legalities should be O.K. The tricky bit is, of course, what constitutes "reasonable effort", but removing all authors who died <70 years ago is a very good start, and (IMHO,IANAL,etc) probably sufficient.
I did make a start on a
relational database for the library a couple of months ago. It is not complete – to make the task manageable a limited myself to epub and mobi books – but at least there is a pretty comprehensive list of authors therein, with some of the duplicates removed. A fun task would be to make an automated wikipedia query for each authors lifespan...
Edit: a better method: Edit: Something like this, for example, for UN*X/cygwin:
Code:
#!/bin/bash
a=${1// /%20}
echo -n $1": "
echo -e $(curl -s "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&titles=$a&prop=revisions&rvprop=content") | grep -o "\(may refer to:\|^| *DATE OF DEATH *=.*\|^| *name *=.*\|^|.*=.*[Dd]eath date.*\|\"missing\":\"\"\\|\"pageid\": *[0-9]\+\)" |sed 's/.*": * //'|xargs
Save in a file, e.g. when_croaked, make executable, and type for example
Code:
./when_croaked "Conan Doyle"
Rather messy output, but at least it gives an indication if a page actually exists, e.g. a disambiguation page, if it doesn't actually give the death date.
Of course, this is by no means a fool-proof method, but if the answer to a query is after 1942, the author in question should be looked at more closely.