Karen Coyle wrote: > It looks to me like this is quite different from OL, but an exchange > of data would be great.
Were you at the OpenKnowledge conference Saturday April 24? I was not there, but apparently, this was the topic of some presentations there. I got introduced to the OKFN bibliographic project by Tatiana de la O ten days earlier, at a Wikimedia meetup in Berlin. I got the impression that publicdomainworks.net was just one of several facets, and that the whole database behind that was very similar to OpenLibrary. I could be wrong about this. I didn't take notes, and can't remember what the other domain names were that I was shown. In any case, the books that I'm most interested in are among the public domain works, and so will appear in both projects. Both projects import library catalogs. When I learned about OKFN's duplication of effort, I was really disappointed. I see tons of problems ahead, and I lose interest in both projects. We don't need multiple projects with exchange of data and a never-ending circulation of errors. We need one centralized project, with a focus on quality improvement. On www.openlibrary.org the first thing I see is the number of 24 million "books". You got to stop counting all these duplicate records. You must start to focus on quality instead of quantity. There aren't 24 million books. Maybe half of these are duplicate records. Have you got any idea how much junk you are carrying around? On the new "upstream.openlibrary.org" complete beginners are encouraged to add books, as if adding more books was needed. No, it's not. Removing duplicate records is what's needed. Adding birth years and other information to author records is also needed. Things that add quality, not quantity. What percentage of author records have anything more than the name? How do we increase that? -- Lars Aronsson ([email protected]) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
