On Dec 9, 2013, at 5:31 AM, Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com wrote:
I'd love too to collaborate with openlibrary, but at the beginning of our IEG project, me and Micru contacted them, in the person of Karen Coyle (User:Kcoyle), a very famous and skilled metadata librarian who is somehow in charge of the project now. She told us that openlibrary is frozen, at the moment, and there is no staff nor funds to get that going. Openlibrary was previously funded but internet Archive.
If someone could build the tool you proposed, Luiz, that would be awesome, but I'm not a technical person and I'm not able to understnd if that is feasible or not. If we have other feedbacks on that, we could propose it as a projects for the next Google Summer of Code: that is a great way to getting technical things done.
I’ve heard that OpenLibrary is in stasis right now too—but also from Karen :-)
It should be do-able to write a loader that can read in the latest OpenLibrary data dump, and write out data of interest [1] to Wikidata. Ideally the loader should be designed so that it can be re-run, when new OpenLibrary data dumps become available. However, I think it would be important to treat OpenLibrary as a data source, but not as a master. We would need to make sure that data that has changed on Wikidata isn’t stomped on by an OpenLibrary load.
If OpenLibrary gets active again, and they are interested in what is in Wikidata has they can always write an equivalent loader that takes data from Wikidata and loads it into their database.
If this sounds useful I’m willing to help out with the work. I guess it would involve a Wikidata RFC? //Ed