Unfortunately, until someone turns this into a library it's just a random pile of books. There is metadata for searching but topical discovery is very poor. Also, there is no collection statement to indicate what is and is not included (nor is it clear that there is a collection concept). It would take a huge effort, but, as I said recently on Twitter, we should see this as raw material not a final product as its usability is quite poor. Some first efforts might be to use the existing metadata to connect this to Wikidata items and to update Wikipedia entries with links to full text. There's also a very large chaff-to-wheat sorting needed, as my first click turned up a bunch of old meeting reports. If anyone has OCLC access it is perhaps plausible that items could be sorted by the OCLC "most held" order rather than whatever they are in now.
I have to say that I find it a bit embarrassing for this to called a "library".
kc
On 3/24/20 11:59 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
Pine W, 24/03/20 21:41:
Forwarding.
Thanks.
On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 3:55 PM Mark Grahammark@archive.org wrote:
On top of our efforts to add links to citations, in Wikipedia articles, to digital versions of referenced book available from archive.org (150K books from 10 Wikipedia language editions and counting…)
The Internet Archive just launched a National Emergency Library.
The announcement is at: http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-emergency-library-to-provide-digitized-books-to-students-and-the-public/
In short, now people can borrow 10 books instead of 5 and there seem to be no limits on how many people can borrow a book at the same time. The waitlists nearly vanished over the course of the last few days.
Federico
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