I kind of wandered into OL from Wikipedia and what I thought was great was:
*Generating a Wikipedia citation template *Being able to put the OCLC reference in as well which means that a Wikmedian can add a reference to an article that includes a link to World Cat. Any reader can use this to find the nearest participating library that has a copy of the book. So now when I am adding info from a book, I track down the book on OL, make sure it has the OCLC info and cut and past the reference. Does this take me less time? Not at first, but if I come back on another day, yes it's easier. One draw back is that OL is not very user friendly. Lots of books are duplicated authors often appear under a variety of names. Perhaps i do a little bit, but last time I mentioned that a book was duplicated all that happened is that I got an e-mail back, giving some reason why nothing could be done about it (as you can see i kind of lost interest, and there was no easy way I could back track to the relevant books). One thing I have noticed amongst London Wikimedians is that not many know about OL and its readymade citations. there is a discussion going on about some joint work between Wikimedia UK and Thurrock Libraries (a public library network in a small town about twenty miles away from London). Now I think it would be really neat if people with research interests could click through Wikipedia to World Cat to find the nearest library copy of a specific book to them. And I see OL could play a significant role in this . . . but it does need to be easier to use. One thing I am not clear about is, to what extent do the sort of library staff I meet in my local library know about OL, World Cat etc. Last time I went in my local library to ask about some ICT training that was offered, I had to show them the page online where it was offered, and they admitted they knew nothing about it (I tried more than one library in my borough). It seemed to me that there was someone a bit removed from front-line service delivery trying to get somethings done, but without the front-line staff being effectively put in the picture. I would be interested if this sort of synergy makes sense to people on the list, whether they feel there might be institutions ready to fund some work on this. I feel some of the funding should go on development, but other funds should go on outreach. all the best Fabian (Leutha on Wikipedia) >In terms of getting grants to get some of the work done, it seems to me > that, although they themselves are underfunded, the motivated > institutions would be those that support libraries. The grant project > that I am involved with (which is tiny, admittedly) would help libraries > add books from the Archive to their catalogs. The idea is that the > Archive/OL becomes an extension to the physical and geographically > located library. Making this work well (and especially getting both OL > and the ebooks from scans in good shape) could be a motivator for grant > funders, because it could save libraries, large and small, significant > money while extending access. > > To this end, it might be useful here to do some brainstorming on what it > might cost to solve some of the more detrimental issues (lack of > merging, for example) so we could determine what we would need to ask > for in a grant proposal. Such a grant might have to come nominally from > the Archive, but we could see about that once we have the needed info. > > kc > > On 11/21/13 3:20 AM, Anand Chitipothu wrote: >> On 21-Nov-2013, at 6:14 AM, Tom Morris wrote: >> >>> The search index not being updated is a known problem, but the Internet >>> Archive staff doesn't appear motivated to work on it. >> >> I think better to say OL is under staffed. I'm the only developer >> working on OL right now and heavily over loaded. >> >>> Ditto not being able to search for names which differ in only accents >>> or other minor differences. >>> >>> One trick you can use to get around the latter problem is to search for >>> a book title (e.g. Far Rainbow) and then click the merge authors button >>> on the right hand side. That will give you authors with all kinds of >>> different spellings (but only for that single title search). >>> >>> Sorry you're wasting so much time on this. It's sad that the Internet >>> Archive doesn't respect volunteers' time enough to provide a minimally >>> functional system. >> >> Blaming is not going to help. >> >> Lets try to identify the big issues that needs to be fixed and see if >> you can help in someway to solve it. >> >> I think important issues are: >> >> * fixing search engine >> * importing modern books >> >> I've tried to fix some of the issues of search engine, but some of the >> old edits which didn't get into search engine are still missing. >> >> Please let me know if there are any issues that you think are important. >> >> Anand >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org >> http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss >> Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ >> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to >> ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org >> > > -- > Karen Coyle > kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net > m: 1-510-435-8234 > skype: kcoylenet > _______________________________________________ > Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss > Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org > _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org
