Open Library

While thumbing through the April issues of American Libraries I noticed a mention of the website openlibrary.org an extremely ambitious project started by the folks at the Internet Archive. It appears after glancing at their website briefly that they are attempting to establish a digitization of non-copyright books as well as attempting to catalog every book ever printed.

Vision of an Open Library

“Today we are making a step towards building the library we have all dreamed of –the library that makes all the published works of humankind available to everyone in the world.”

“What if there were a library that held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.”

The first part, the digitization project is definitely interesting, and one can go check out the few books that they have digitized on their website, but I’m not sure how this will play out against the google books project or other digitization efforts. The second part, the cataloging aspect, is what really intrigues me.

Spearheading this effort is 21 year old Aaron Swartz who says ”Our goal is to get metadata about every book to explain why a book is interesting and then provide as many ways of getting it as possible: buying it from a bookstore or a used bookseller, borrowing it from a library, or reading a digitized copy.”

They are currently accepting data from any library or organization and claim to have already received the records for LOC, University of Toronto to just name a few. They currently have a draft of their schema”Futurelib” posted here.

Since this is just beginning, there really isn’t a website or opac to critique, and I don’t feel qualified enough to comment on their initial model of their schema, but the promise of what they are trying to accomplish is overwhelming. The greatest appeal to me is the open source or community driven aspect of it all. Anybody can participate. I especially like their matter of fact call for data

Data collection

We want as much data as we can get our hands on. If you know anyone with data or know how to get some, please get in touch.

They also mention that they would like to incorporate reviews as well as tagging, possibly link to wikipedia, worldcat, and others.

Will this ever come to fruition? I don’t know, but there are so many interesting facets to the whole project that I encourage everybody to at least take a look. If they can accomplish 10% of what they wish, I believe it will be an extremely valuable resource.