Hi Seth, Welcome to the list and (small?) community :)
I'm not on the OL developers team, so I can only give my opinion of possible priorities - others may correct my view of OL. I found OL as a CC0-licenced database of bibliographic data (the catalogue), but there's more to it: - the infrastructure (found on GitHub) for letting users - maintain the catalogue, and - borrow e-books - a reference instance of this infrastructure (openlibrary.org) - connections to other libraries to support lending e-books through openlibrary.org's catalogue at local libraries. As my reason for coming here was the catalogue, most of the things I have done here had/have to do with improving the quality of the data. I add/update books via the web interface and developed VacuumBot to do several specific tasks (see its profile page [1] for a list), but there is a lot more to do. Unicode normalisation, de-duplication of records (by merging), splitting records to one record per format (because I would like to be able to differentiate between a paperback and an EPUB version of the same book, unlike most(?) libraries), moving dimensions to the correct field, detecting spam etc. Highest on my wishlist is a web interface for merging works and editions, so that e.g. the Harry Potter series [2] can be restored to seven works, one for each part, and the 10000+ edition results for a "Shirley institute 1977" search [3] can be merged into less than five (although this is more a machine job :)). The APIs provide full control over the data, so that this web interface need not run on openlibrary.org. But as I see openlibrary.org as the reference user interface, it would make sense to have it there. Having said that, more links between Open Library and Project Gutenberg would be nice too. Or you just pick your own priorities. :) Ben [1] http://openlibrary.org/people/vacuumbot [2] http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL23919A/J._K._Rowling [3] http://openlibrary.org/search?q=shirley+institute+1977 On 1 February 2013 00:33, Seth Woodworth <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 5:41 PM, Tom Morris <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> It'd be a cool project, but it seems like there might be higher priority >> things to work on with OL basically on life support. >> >> > Hello list! > > I've been working on a project involving Project Gutenberg texts off and > on for six months, have been around archive.org projects, OLPC and the > open-content space for several years. Unfortunately, OL only came across > my radar sometime last week. It's an awesome project and I am very very > excited that it exists. > > I would like to get involved and help move the project forward. I'm a > developer who does python, a good deal of scraping and quite a bit of web > dev. > > Tom mentioned priorities for the project. I've seen the github issues, but > they aren't sorted by priority. > > What are the priorities of the project, and what does the current > structure of development look like? I would like to get involved. > > --Seth Woodworth > Lead Developer, FinalsClub > > _______________________________________________ > Ol-tech mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > [email protected] > >
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