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
