John Vandenberg wrote:
The underlying problem is that OL is approaching this
from a
traditional library perspective, and so is opening up slowly,
and progress is slow and methodical.
But they are not. They are starting from the Internet Archive
(Brewster Kahle) perspective. "Real" archivists and librarians
have complained that the Internet Archive is not enough of an
archive, and OpenLibrary is not enough of a library. This is of
course very similar to people complaining that Wikipedia is not
enough of an encyclopedia. Both OpenLibrary and Wikipedia are
primarily Internet projects. Perhaps the most interesting
criticism of OpenLibrary was launched by Tim Spalding, founder of
LibraryThing.com (another Internet project, but a commercial one,
albeit with some volunteer vibes). He meant (my interpretation)
that OpenLibrary asks a lot from libraries (a copy of their
catalog database) but doesn't give much back, and giving something
back would help OpenLibrary to win more allies among libraries,
http://mail.archive.org/pipermail/ol-discuss/2009-August/000638.html
The first website to appear on the domain
www.openlibrary.org was
an online viewer for books scanned by/for the Internet Archive, so
if "being able to read" is a requirement for a library, then it
did have that function from the start. Later another website
appeared on
demo.openlibrary.org, containing catalog records. The
demo website is what you now find as
openlibrary.org. It is as if
the online viewer and the bibliographic database are two different
projects, and the Internet Archive put the new project under the
old domain. But the online viewer is still there, for the books
that have been digitized.
To some, it seems that OL will reach the holy grail
first,
The OpenLibrary has a head start. Any project started now will
have to spend much time to catch up. Any good ideas that might go
into a new project, could be used in the existing Openlibrary.
For example, a new project might download the database dump from
OpenLibrary and start to weed out the "junk records". But that
junk sorting could also take place inside OpenLibrary. Why not?
If a new project goes to a library to ask for a copy of their
catalog, they might get the question "we already gave (or didn't
give) that to OpenLibrary, so how is your project any different?"
And what should the new project answer to that?
I want to encourage wikipedians and wikisourcerers to join the
OpenLibrary project, just like you should also join OpenStreetMap
and other good projects for free knowledge and information. Bring
your experience. If you get tired of one project, as I do
sometimes, work on another one for a while.
OpenLibrary has author pages for 6.5 million author names. Some of
these are "junk" duplicates that should be merged, but still there
are quite a large number of authors there. These have a field for
a Wikipedia URL, but only 1100 records have a value. Connecting
author pages in OpenLibrary to Wikipedia biographies is just one
way where we can do a lot, without needing to start a new project.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se