GBV (GVK) as a bibliographic online source

[Philologist]

I highly recommend GBV (GVK) as a bibliographic online source. This Library Network has been steadily growing, and the number of participating institutions has now reached 2010!

I made a random comparison with the Library of Congress just now. I searched for the novelists Joseph Conrad, Halldór Laxness (winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature), and a few other famous authors. In all cases the hits in GBV (GVK) greatly outnumbered the hits I got from the Library of Congress. Since GBV (GVK) is not a library but a network of more than 2000 libraries and institutions, the same item may have turned up multiple times, I didn't test that. But the results are impressive:

Shakespeare
In GBV (GVK) 80033
Library of Congress 10000

Joseph Conrad
In GBV (GVK) 8483
Library of Congress 1171

Voltaire
In GBV (GVK) 20742
Library of Congress 3718

Rousseau
In GBV (GVK) 25746
Library of Congress 8213

Henrik Ibsen
In GBV (GVK) 4490
Library of Congress 632

August Strindberg
In GBV (GVK) 4115
Library of Congress 379

Aristotle
In GBV (GVK) 28577
Library of Congress 7246

Aristoteles
In GBV (GVK) 24898
Library of Congress 1426

Halldór Laxness
In GBV (GVK) 766
Library of Congress 169

[Dellu]

Thank you for letting us know. This is extremely useful information.
Long time ago, I used to get the best quality book reference from Library of Stanford. The quality of the reference from google Books is not that reliable. World Cat used to be the next great source. Since WorldCat's new interface, really, I have been entering my references manually because none of the existing options are reliable. I never heard of GBV.

I am going to try it now.
Thank you so much.

[Philologist]

I never heard of GBV.

Well, I posted about this online source here in 2017 and again in 2021. :–)

Allow me to make one remark. It seems the GBV (GVK) doesn't always distinguish between authors, editors and translators. Sometimes they dump the author and the translator into the editor's field where they don't belong.

I don't know why this happens. Maybe I need to tweak the import filter once again (I already did that years ago.) This anomaly is restricted to the fields 'author' and 'editor', and since I usually already know who the author is and who the editor is, I just correct this manually.

After you have tested GBV (GVK), please let us know what you think.