Hi Lars, Completely agree that one of our biggest issues today is duplicates. As I mentioned in the other thread, the first tool we're planning to release is an Author Merge, as that will hopefully help us find duplicate Works too, and even Editions where possible.
Re: centralization - I'm with Karen. What we're trying to do is create a network of information about books - a "networked index card" if you will. That said, we're also hoping that people might begin using Open Library URLs/URIs to point at books on the web, but, as you rightly say, the dupes stand in the way of that being easy to do today. <snip> > A useful system comes from centralization, when we agree > to only use one code for each artifact, </snip> The trouble is, we find it so hard to agree! Impossible, even :) Cheers, george Lars Aronsson wrote: > 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. > > _______________________________________________ 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]
