Forwarding.
Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 3:55 PM Mark Graham mark@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.
We would like to collaborate with, and otherwise support, every related WikiCite project.
The team at the Internet Archive that is now working on this project include:
Maximilian Doerr (cyberpower678) Stephen Balbach (GreenC) James Hare (harej) Jake Orlowitz (ocaasi)
Please reach out to me directly if you would like to explore what we can do together!
- Mark Graham
Director, the Wayback Machine @ the Internet Archive (917) 697-0110
Wikidata mailing list Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
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
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
Libraries mailing list Libraries@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries
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
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
On Fri, 27 Mar 2020 at 19:05, Karen Coyle kcoyle@kcoyle.net wrote:
How can we create useful collections from these online materials?
The Wikimedia ecosystem gives us a number of tools that can be used for this, including
* Wikisource, where works can be transcribed, and categorised
* Wikidata where the metadata can be stored, checked and improved; and where we can document related identities such as publishers, and authors
* Wikipedia, where we can write list articles, or have them populated by Wikidata queries; not to mention articles about authors
Wikidata can also be used to populate external tools like Scholia.
Then we have a number of tools on the toolserver, which allow us to crowdsource things like identifier matches, main sujects, and links to authors, and add them to Wikidata
I would love to see a "Wiki-bibliography" - where we could gather things like reading lists from courses, and where people can put annotated bibliographies on topics. I'm not exactly sure how it would work -- would there be one bibliography per topic? Or could everyone add their own bibliography? (Then we get back into the "personal lists" problem.)
Having done a fair amount of reading in library discussions of the 19th century, it is clear that the library catalog was primarily a "find it in this library" tool and subject access was often conducted through authoritative bibliographies. (Also see Thomas Mann's essay on research at the Library of Congress. [1]) This goes beyond categorization to: here are the key books/resources in this topic. Reading lists / bibliographies could be developed for different audiences and learning levels. I suspect that this will work better for the humanities than some of the fast-moving sciences, but I think it could be very useful.
Anyway, that's my dream.
p.s. There once was a publication called "books for college libraries" that I wanted to run against the large University of California union catalog to surface the basic books in each subject area. Something like this would be very helpful.
kc [1] http://www2.hawaii.edu/~donnab/lis605/Peloponnesian_War_future_of_cataloging...
On 3/27/20 12:35 PM, Andy Mabbett wrote:
On Fri, 27 Mar 2020 at 19:05, Karen Coyle kcoyle@kcoyle.net wrote:
How can we create useful collections from these online materials?
The Wikimedia ecosystem gives us a number of tools that can be used for this, including
Wikisource, where works can be transcribed, and categorised
Wikidata where the metadata can be stored, checked and improved; and
where we can document related identities such as publishers, and authors
- Wikipedia, where we can write list articles, or have them populated
by Wikidata queries; not to mention articles about authors
Wikidata can also be used to populate external tools like Scholia.
Then we have a number of tools on the toolserver, which allow us to crowdsource things like identifier matches, main sujects, and links to authors, and add them to Wikidata
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 at 15:53, Karen Coyle kcoyle@kcoyle.net wrote:
I would love to see a "Wiki-bibliography" - where we could gather things like reading lists from courses, and where people can put annotated bibliographies on topics. I'm not exactly sure how it would work -- would there be one bibliography per topic? Or could everyone add their own bibliography? (Then we get back into the "personal lists" problem.)
Wikipedia has "list of books about foo" articles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_books
As with all Wikipedia comment you can edit them, or make additional pages.
bibliographies could be developed for different audiences and learning levels.
AIUI, Wikiversity accommodates this.
Thanks. Wikiversity may have the potential, but at the moment its organization can be quite odd. I'll try to hang out in that community for a bit and see what direction it is going in.
I'm hoping for something more specific than lists of books. Something evaluative. These are mainly fiction genre and are of books with pages in wikipedia. I think something like Wikiversity will be closer to what's needed, but I really would like to see annotated selections. I should do an example - put my bibliography where my typing is, or something like that. I'll work on that.
kc
On 3/28/20 9:09 AM, Andy Mabbett wrote:
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 at 15:53, Karen Coyle kcoyle@kcoyle.net wrote:
I would love to see a "Wiki-bibliography" - where we could gather things like reading lists from courses, and where people can put annotated bibliographies on topics. I'm not exactly sure how it would work -- would there be one bibliography per topic? Or could everyone add their own bibliography? (Then we get back into the "personal lists" problem.)
Wikipedia has "list of books about foo" articles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_booksAs with all Wikipedia comment you can edit them, or make additional pages.
bibliographies could be developed for different audiences and learning levels.
AIUI, Wikiversity accommodates this.
On 3/27/20 3:05 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
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).
There are some other metrics one can use for a useful ordering. Number of views/downloads, which the Internet Archive tracks, is a popular one, and useful to a point, though it shouldn't be used to exclusion of all else, as it can can end up hiding useful materials on less popular topics.
For subject browsing on The Online Books Page, I use some metadata- based measures to rank within subject categories. Dates are used for ranking, where boosts are given not just for recency (as also occurs in many OPACs) but also for temporal proximity to the subject, if we have relevant dates in the heading. (So books on the American Civil War published during or near the time of the war get a boost, for instance.) I also use the ordering of subjects in my records as an estimate of their importance, so listings for subject X will turn up books with X is their first subject above books with that as their fifth subject. (That's one reason I really hope libraries don't drop support for librarian-assigned subject ordering, as some newer systems do.) We also cluster similar subjects, an effect that's most relevant for subjects that don't have many books filed under them.
I also give a boost to "work" clusters (which in my case are manually rather than automatically created; though in an automated system one could use number of editions or amount of metadata recorded for them as a rough estimate of how important publishers and librarians have found a work-- at least if the clustering is reasonably accurate.)
There are other techniques one can use for useful ordering. These are ones I've found worth implementing on my sites, and could also be used elsewhere if one saw fit.
John
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
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:
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