Karen Coyle wrote: > Actually, I disagree about a centralized project. I think those days > are past. We should now be able to interlink projects, which will > allow more freedom and innovation,
The web already has thousands of library catalogs and other book sites. I could join any one of them. The very point with openlibrary.org is that of being a centralized focal point, where each book (and each author) has *one* webpage, one unique URL, not many. Plurality is like liberating the Dewey system by allowing any topic to have any number. German grammar no longer needs to be 435, it can be 17 or 351 or anything you want. That is freedom, but it will not help anybody. A useful system comes from centralization, when we agree to only use one code for each artifact, so that we have to agree which webpage (not many, but one) should describe the 2nd edition (1861) of Hagberg's Swedish translation of Shakespeare's works. Whether it should be http://openlibrary.org/b/OL23460945M/Shakseare%27s_Dramatiska_Arbeten_Ofversatta or if it should be http://openlibrary.org/b/OL23543787M/SHAKSPEARE%27S_DRAMATISKA_ARBETEN that is the question! There are two, and that is one too many. Concluding from this sample, 2 URLs for one book, the 24 million records might only represent 12 million books. How do we know what the actual number is? More parallel projects won't help us to get any closer to the truth. Removing duplicate records from openlibrary.org will. Users should be encouraged (by statistics, by easy to use functions, and maybe by finder's rewards) to merge duplicate records, not adding new ones. When we run out of duplicates, that will be a great day. -- 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]
