If you want to continue this thread, please do it on ol-discuss. I'm forwarding a copy of what I bcc'd this list on because ol-tech is apparently set to moderate messages where it is bcc'd and I have no idea how long moderation will take.
I tried to capture the main relevant comments from that long mixed thread, but if I missed a relevant one of yours, I apologize. Please include it in a reply to ol-discuss. Tom ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tom Morris <[email protected]> Date: Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 9:56 AM Subject: OpenLibrary's mission & role - what should it be? To: Open Library -- general discussion <[email protected]> [bcc: ol-tech] A recent tool discussion on ol-tech got side tracked into the question of OpenLibrary's mission and role and what the community thinks it should be for the future. It's really more appropriate to ol-discuss, so I've moved it over. The full discussion can be found in the archive<http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00937.html>. Although OpenLbirary is owned by the Internet Archive and is therefor under the direction of its Board of Directors, hopefully they would seriously consider input from the community, so I think it's a discussion worth having. I've reproduced a portion of the thread below to bring people up to speed. Several of the messages were in reply to this: On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Lars Aronsson <[email protected]> wrote: > > Before discussing a new tool, what are we trying to achieve? [...] > > We have now the Internet Archive that scans books on a > large scale, and also imports scanned books from Google. > We have Project Gutenberg, Project Runeberg, and > Wikisource for proofreading the OCR text of those books. > We have Wikipedia in many languages for providing > background facts about authors, works, and genres. > > What else is needed, and what role does OpenLibrary > play? On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Tom Johnson <[email protected]> wrote: > *> *What else is needed, and what role does OpenLibrary play? When we > know this, I think we can find the right tool for the task. > > Figuring this out is clearly step one for any community effort of > revitalization. One of the things we talked about doing once we had a > community wiki was to call on people and libraries who use the Open Library > to talk about how they use it. Informally, libraries have expressed that > this resource is important to them--so we need to identify priorities. > > My personal feeling is that OL provides a few things which are different > from the projects you mentioned. Mainly, it attempts to be a *comprehensive > resource* offering *structured (open?) data* about every book. > > Other projects stop well short of this goal. Wikipedia, for instance, has > notability rules. Arguably, simply having been published doesn't make a > book notable enough to merit a page; certainly people would become upset if > I wrote a bot that added book pages en masse from LoC data dumps. Wikidata > might be the closest neighbor, but it doesn't quite have the same shape. > Compare, for instance: > http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q174596<http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q174596> > to http://openlibrary.org/works/OL102749W/Moby_Dick > > On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 7:48 PM, Lee Passey <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, March 14, 2013 8:47 am, Lars Aronsson wrote: > > > Before discussing a new tool, what are we trying to achieve? > > Right now, it appears to me that Open Book Catalog is lacking a vision > and a visionary. Even the platitude "one web page for every book" is so > broad as to be essentially meaningless. That is what we already have, so > what's missing? The data may be incomplete, it may be unreliable, it may > be unreusable for legal reasons, it may be unreusable for technical > reasons, and it may not lead to any actual content, but hey, there /is/ > one web page for every book! On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 7:14 AM, kltrg <[email protected]> wrote: > > I don't see other projects having so many structured information about > works and it's editions. OL is machine readable. I think that should be the > goal: Having as much structured information about any work we can. > >
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