Searching the Catalog to Check on the Status of an Edition, Author, or Work

So you have an edition of a classical author and or authors that you would like to have included in the Perseus catalog, fabulous! The first step on the cataloging journey you are about to begin is to determine if this edition has already been cataloged by searching the Perseus Catalog.

Detailed steps on how to search the catalog can be found here as part of the user guide, this documentation also includes full descriptions of how to understand the search results including top level work records and individual edition records.

So The Edition is Already Cataloged-What Now?

If it turns out that an edition has already been cataloged what needs to be done next largely depends on the information you have in hand. If you have found a new digitized version of an edition, the URL/s can be added into the existing MODS record in catalog_data. This is relatively simple if it contains only a single author-work combination, because there will only be one MODS record that will then need to be updated in Github. If an edition has multiple author-works then the various MODS records for these versions in Github will need to be updated, since one MODS record will exist for each individual work in the edition [LINK]. The easiest way to find the MODS record/records in question in catalog_data is simply to copy the CTS-URN found in the edition record and search for that across the whole repository.

For example, say you found that the catalog already includes an edition record for an 1885 edition of Cicero's Academica by James Reid and published by Macmillan, but doesn't include the link for the digitized version you had found in the HathiTrust. Copy the CTS-URN from the edition record (phi0474.phi045.opp-lat1) directly into the catalog_data repository search and this should take you directly to the MODS record that needs editing.

My Edition's Not Cataloged-What Do I Do Next?

If an author-work-edition is not found in the Perseus Catalog, the next step is to determine if this edition is on the Perseus List of Standard Editions, a list of mostly public domain editions maintained by the Perseus Project to guide its digitization and cataloging efforts. Checking this list can be helpful because if it contains your edition it will provide much of the necessary information for enhancing the catalog record as described here[LINK], including links to Worldcat.org, already discovered online versions, etc.

The list of Greek and/or Latin authors in the Authors-Abbreviations-Editions spreadsheet can also be checked to see if this author has already been identified (even if they have not been cataloged) along with links to the relevant online authority records and lists of works with relevant identifiers.

Whether your edition is on the List of Standard Editions or is not, your next step will be to either create or download a MODS record for your edition, described here.

NOTE: One future goal is to have all potential contributors search the CITE Collection Tables to check on the status of authors and works.