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
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'll mention that one project I did was comparing the holdings in a public library to the Open Library open access books so that the library could offer unlimited access to books where they would generally have only a few hard copy items. This was in keeping with the sense of their collection but also expanded access. If we could link from digitized copies to library collections that would be a huge gain. It solves the wheat/chaff problem, although not the ranking one. The problem there is matching works/expressions (ISBN is not good enough).
Anyway, onward - and if anyone wishes to manage a project, please post widely as I think a crowd-sourced solution is much needed.
kc
On 3/26/20 2:12 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
Karen Coyle, 26/03/20 17:44:
Unfortunately, until someone turns this into a library it's just a random pile of books.
I think the general idea is that archive.org is indeed the "pile of books" while the actual library (aspirationally) is openlibrary.org. Looking at the collection on archive.org is like looking at the compactus room or the inventory books.
Federico