Karen Coyle, 27/03/20 21:05:
I sort of agree with this, but unfortunately no part
of their
announcement links to Open Library, just to this:
https://archive.org/details/nationalemergencylibrary
I suspect that has to do with some (temporary?) technical limitations,
for instance I believe some books on
archive.org are not yet linked from
openlibrary.org. (I think it was something like 5 % a while ago. Can't
remember if this was the issue:
<https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/1046>.)
Open Library (
https://openlibrary.org) has some good features (full
disclosure: I was on the original OL team at the Archive) but it doesn't
solve the wheat/chaff problem - something that all large libraries have.
It also doesn't have a way to provide a useful order of retrievals,
which is also the case for the Google Books site (OCLC uses numbers of
holdings, which is pretty good, but no one else has access to that data).
I would love to see curated collections from these book databases. Open
Library has lists, but they are personal lists and not well managed. How
can we create useful collections from these online materials?
I don't have any smart idea for such a complex matter, on which much
better minds have engaged.
However, I've seen Italian librarians do something very simple: editing
references and bibliographies of Wikipedia articles (mostly in Italian
but not only) to add new works or new links for existing works. It's a
low-tech solution, nothing very fancy, but I think it works, because it
puts the books right under the nose of those who may need them. I don't
have hard numbers to prove the overall impact.
At much larger scale, InternetArchiveBot
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/InternetArchiveBot> is adding hundreds
of thousands of links from (English) Wikipedia articles to
archive.org
books. The number of clicks on references may be underwhelming, but in a
few months we may know more about what kind of impact this has on the
overall discoverability of a collection of millions of books.
Federico