Andreas

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Again, welcome! Inductiveload—talk/contribs 18:16, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

IA scans

Hi! The index Index:The Ballads and songs of Ayrshire (IA balladssongsofay00pate).pdf now exists (The file had been uploaded previously by Fæbot).

Just a hint about the scans at the IA. I noticed you linked to balladsandsongs00graygoog on your user page. This is a Google Books scan. Google scans (usually end in goog) and Digital Library of India scans (start with dli) are very often poor-quality and missing pages or images. Generally, if you look for scans at IA with coloured thumbnails, this indicates that they were scanned by the IA themselves or Microsoft and are generally more likely to be complete and in good condition. It's not always true, but it's a good rule-of-thumb. Generally, only go for Google or DLI if you can't find a better one. I can get works from Hathi Trust if you can't find them at the IA, but it sometimes takes a bit of time for me to get round to it.

Also, check out the IA-upload tool which allows you to easily transfer scans from the IA to Commons. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 16:18, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Inductiveload:, no idea how I managed to not see your message for 8 days... Thanks again for all the info and support! I have used IA quite a bit in my research but never spent much thought on the sources of the scans. By the way, do you know what's up with the weird capitalisation in some index pages? Like, in The Ballads and songs of Ayrshire, "songs" should be capitalised, no? --Andreas (talk) 07:57, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

@Andreas: No problem, happy to help. :-)

Re caps, it's a library convention (from the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Appendix A) that all words except proper nouns are lowercase. This means the bibliographic source data (e.g. at IA) probably uses this convention. It always looked ugly to me, but it's a "thing". Generally at enWS we use title case for the titlesActually the Style guide says "sentence case", but it seems that's not a hard and fast rule. Feel free to change the link, I don't think anyone minds. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 08:08, 24 November 2020 (UTC)