[Foundation-l] [Wikisource-l] Universal Library

[Lars Aronsson]

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 at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se