I'm happy to have anyone who's interested in contributing and moving things forward have a say. I'm going to assume that Tim wants to contribute. Having said that I disagree that it would be a good idea to waste effort on antiquated library formats and protocols just as they are (finally!) getting ready to move forward. I also don't see the value in bemoaning what would have been. "Well, I wouldn't start from here," makes for a great Maine farmer joke, but it's not very useful in real life.
Personally, I'd like to see Open Library be a shining example of "cataloging done right." Cataloging and discovery services for readers instead of catalogers and librarians. Kind of a cross between BiblioCommons, Small Demons, and BibFrame all rolled into one and built using open technologies, richly linked to Wikipedia and other sources of web information. A few years ago I would have added VIAF to that mix too, but they seem to have made good progress and are publishing under a reasonable license. Providing open data for services like AuthorClaim is an important goal too, in my mind. Data quality is a serious issue, but I don't think it's an intractable one. Freebase has made some progress in untangling the duplicate author mess and I've offered the Open Library staff my assistance in using that to clean up the original Open Library data. The relatively recent OL Merge Author functionality has helped people clean the dupes up here. Freebase also independently created works records which could be used to cross check the Open Library works algorithm. Ben has been doing good work on the data cleaning front. With some organization and a combination of machine-based and crowdsourced approaches, I think the problem is solvable. Tom On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 7:18 AM, Lars Aronsson <[email protected]> wrote: > On 03/07/2013 08:16 PM, raj kumar wrote: > > Trolls kill communities. Do not feed the troll. > > Tim Spalding certainly is not a troll, and if anything has > killed OpenLibrary, it wasn't him. OL's problem is the lack > of a clear vision and purpose. "One page for every book" > is one vision I've heard, but it doesn't solve any real > problem for me. Besides, there were lots of different > pages for each book, false duplicates, that it would take > ages to sort through and merge. > > > -- > Lars Aronsson ([email protected]) > Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/ > > > _______________________________________________ > 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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