This doesn't reflect my understanding of the situation at OpenLibrary.

On Mon, 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.

Karen has worked for OpenLibrary in the past, but I don't know if she currently does and she's certainly not in charge.

OpenLibrary is owned and funded by the Internet Archive (ie Brewster Kahle).  It is funded at a much lower level than it has been historically
 
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. 

I'm not sure I agree.  There's a lot of good data in OpenLibrary, but there's also a lot of junk.  Freebase imported a bunch of OpenLibrary data, after winnowing it to what they thought was the good stuff, and still ended up deleting a bunch of the supposedly "good" stuff later because they found their goodness criteria hadn't been strict enough.

One of the reasons OpenLibrary is such a mess is because *they* arbitrarily imported junky data (e.g. Amazon scraped records).  The last thing the world needs is more duplicate copies of random junk.  We've already got the DPLA for that. :-)

Another issue with the OpenLibrary metadata is that there's no clear license associated with it.  IA's position is that they got it from wherever they got it from and you're own your own if you want to reuse it, which isn't very helpful.  The provenance for major chunks of it is traceable and new stuff by users is nominally being contributed under CC0, so they could probably be sorted out with enough effort (although the same thing is true of the data quality issues too).

If Ed Summers (or any other capable programmer) is going to sign up to solve this problem for you guys, I'm happy to help with my knowledge of the state of play, but it's a very  sizeable project.

Tom