I just attended a meeting here at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society featuring a presentation by Aaron Swartz of the Open Library project <http://demo.openlibrary.org/>
It's still in development, but their goal is "a Web page for every book." It will include not only descriptive metadata but also links to full text when available, links to online sellers, links to libraries holding the book. Print on demand and scan on demand will be offered. It will be an open wiki-like environment. They plan to include features like social tagging. Of the three dozen or so people in attendance, only a minority were librarians. The group included Tim Spalding of LibraryThing, David Weinberger (author of Everything is Miscellaneous, and other books), and other movers and shakers. People seemed not only well aware of FRBR concepts but threw around terms like "FRBRization" with ease. Someone even mentioned FRBRoo, the object-oriented model of FRBR that is being developed. There was some discussion of all the kinds of relationships between "books" (at whatever level of FRBR entities you want to look at) that you might want to show, as well as of the difficulties of authority control in a large file. (Not that they've solved all these problems.) Open Library has worked with librarians as well as people from other fields, so it seems they are familiar with a lot we have to offer. They have gotten a lot of bibliographic data from libraries, including LC, but they have found some libraries resistant to sharing. They've tried to work with OCLC, but haven't had a lot of success. Aaron Swartz remarked that librarians have a 500-page book of cataloging rules, but people on the Internet aren't interested in that kind of detail. It's interesting that although this is a Web 2.0 kind of project, they are not chiefly interested in digital objects. In fact, they are more interested in out-of-print books than those in print. Right now, they are focused on monographs, but they are aware of serials and the many new layers of complexity they involve. All in all, a fascinating meeting. -- ___________________________________________________________ John Hostage Authorities Librarian Langdell Hall [EMAIL PROTECTED] Harvard Law School Library +(1)(617) 495-3974 (voice) Cambridge, MA 02138 +(1)(617) 496-4409 (fax) http://www.law.harvard.edu/library/ -----------------------------------------------------------
