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Q: How is Open Library funded? Are you working on it full time? And how many people are involved in the project?

A: It’s currently being funded by the Internet Archive, with the help of some state and federal library grants. We have some volunteers, but also about 5 people working full-time (a couple programmers, a designer, and a product manager).

Q: Some serious questions have come up about the shrinking depth of subject cataloging from the book records issued by the Library of Congress. That might sound like a problem just for librarians, but it isn’t. It’s basic infrastructure for intellectual life, pretty much. To anyone doing research, having books adequately cataloged by subject offers tremendous benefits. Will Open Library be taking up the slack on this?

A: Yes, it’s amazing the amount of politics around Library of Congress Subject Headings. (And I had no idea that they were thinking about abandoning them — that’s incredible; thanks for the pointer.) Lots of people have different opinions over how things should be characterized and cataloged and which things were important. When we first started the project, librarians kept arguing about which system we should use.

We decided early on to not be partisan but to be a clearinghouse for all the cataloging data we could get our hands on. So in areas where the Library of Congress doesn’t do the cataloging, or doesn’t do the cataloging to your taste, we’ll try to make that data available.

We’re hoping we’ll be able to pull series data from the specialized libraries so that you can view them on our web site. We’ll also republish them so that other libraries can import them from us.

Q: Open Library will also serve as a central directory for books available in digital formats. Some such material is freely available to everyone (e.g., the Project Guttenberg editions). And some of it has more limited access. Will you link to the latter? And do you have a policy or opinion about dealing with Google Books?

A: Yes, we hope to link to everything interesting — free or not, although obviously we prefer free and can do more with it. We’re planning to link to Google Books and we’re hoping we can get copies of their public domain books.

This is fantastic. I went to the Danbury site. I looked up Da Vinci code and the tag cloud worked the way I had hoped. When I clicked on Magdalene, I got a list of related books. I love having access to the tag cloud. I know about and have visited LibraryThing, Flickr, de.li.ci.ous. I even have accounts, but I have not really participated. This makes me want to catalog my own library on LibraryThing. To be able to share my interests and my own tags with so many others in my own public library system is intriguing. I catalog materials for a school district. We don’t feel comfortable adding so many subject headings on the MARC record. The headings have to be accepted Sears subject headings. But, with the tag cloud, you have all the connections that a wide variety of people made. Some of these tags speak to me more than others. By the way, Steve, I notice that you are with my own Pierce County Library System, the best system around. I suspect you have something to do with many of the wonderful new services available at PCLS. Thanks for all you do.

How Libraries can use LibraryThing





• Collection Development
  
  
  
  • “People who own this book also own…”
  
  
  • Search or browse tags
  
  
  • Find foreign-language books