The Internet Archive recently released a demo version of its new Open Library project, about which we are very excited.
We’re great fans of the IA, due to the wonderful Bookmobile and the all-encompassing awesomeness of their main site, the largest collection of its kind of publicly-available text, images, audio and video, as well as the world’s largest history of the web. So when we heard they were turning their attention to paper books, we were looking forward to seeing what they came up with.
Their mission statement is worth reading in full:
What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.
First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.
Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.
But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply “free to the people,” as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it’s more important than ever to be open. [Source]
But what’s it like, beyond the rhetoric? Well, it’s a collection of listings for every edition of every book that’s ever made it into library classification (or at least, that’s what it will be), as well as scans of those editions which have already made it into the Archive’s copyright-free library.
If:Book has some quibbles about the presentation, but I’m far more interested in what this means at the level of data and metadata.
For starters, Library data is not free. The OCLC, the world’s largest supplier of library data (and recent receiver of much Charkin-praise), is a non-profit which charges for it’s data feeds. The Open Library plans to build futurelib, an open, universal book catalogue, which will contain all books, not just those which arrived recently enough for the increasingly outmoded ISBN classification, or which belong to organisations hooked in to the OCLC’s network.
Secondly, an Open Library can consolidate and clarify all these data structures, not enslaved to the horribly outdated Dewey Decimal system, the increasingly subjective and unwieldy Library of Congress Classification system, the publishers’ proprietary and unworkable BIC and ONIX systems, or even the tag-based user-generated systems of the new wave, but providing a translation point between them all, as well as serving as a rallying call to create new and better schemas.
They plan to consolidate all the information surrounding the book too - imagine a place to go and search out books that contains not only the book itself, its various classifications and summaries, but also reviews at every level, from Amazon one-stars up to scholarly monographs, references and antecedents, cover art through time, location and author data… the possibilities are almost limitless.
So too are the commercial applications, with print-on-demand of scanned titles planned, with the trade-off of open sourcing the software driving the library. It will be interesting to look back in fifty or a hundred years to see how static this project (or a similar one) has become. If ebooks take over, will a project like the OL become a true archive, indexing only the past? Even if this is the outcome, it only strengthens the case for such a project. We look forward to following its progress.
Sorry it’s been quiet around here. With London Lit Plus in full swing for the last couple of weeks, and a new job, it’s been a little hectic. However, we do have one important announcement.
Lit+ (litplus.com) is a new booktwo.org project: taking the London Lit Plus ethos - an open-access, distributed literary festival - and turning it into a template that anyone can use to set up their own festival. We’ll be using the same kind of tools - the power of the internet and free software - to create a resource for all.
We’ve already had plenty of outside interest in London Lit Plus and we want to use the momentum to build new and exciting literary cultures. We’ll need your help, so stay tuned.
Images courtesy of Yaniv Golan and Robert Brook, via Creative Commons.
Image: Penguin screen William Gibson doc No Maps For These Territories in Second Life. More information…
Citing the crucial need to access records on nuclear waste storage, or census returns, in five, 10 or even 100 years’ time, [Natalie Ceeney, chief executive of the National Archives] said: “This is a critical issue for us, and for UK society as a whole. We assume our personal records are secure, we expect our pensions to be paid, but anyone with a floppy disc even three or four years old is already having a hard time finding a computer that will open it.” [Source]
This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and pertinent articles I’ve seen in the papers for a while: National Archive project to avert digital dark age.
First of all, it makes me nervous that Microsoft is a verbose partner in this. Isn’t the reliance on one or two companies’ proprietary formats what got us into this mess in the first place? MS are renowned for their distaste for open and accessible formats (witness their approach to web standards embodied in Internet Explorer, or the furore over the BBC’s MS-powered iPlayer), so while it is probably necessary that they should be involved to rescue these files, let’s hope the Archives have learnt their lesson and are moving towards the use of open, extensible, standards-based code.
I’m going to point again to this article about validation, because I think it says a lot of things very well about the importance of using this kind of code:
This is an attempt to make a code that can go decades and centuries, getting broader in scope without ever shutting out it’s early versions. Because that’s what we need the code to do: this code is for recording what we think. There are no paper backups of the web. Every day we put more on it that we’re not putting in our traditional medias. If we don’t use extensible code, then our current history evaporates with the next minor tech change. We’ve never had this problem before. Before a mark on a page could go centuries; there’d always be daylight to read it by. This is a new problem and it required a new solution. [Source]
This is as important in publishing as it is in other fields. As we move inevitably towards ebooks and beyond, it’s very easy to imagine a situation, twenty, thirty years from now when a decade-old literary work becomes inaccessible because it was composed on a computer, revised on others, and encoded in an obsolete, proprietary format for distribution - and never once written down on paper.
The solution, I’m afraid, is not to write everything down on paper - there’s too much of it now, and it’s wasteful and irresponsible to boot - but to make sure that we use the best, most open, most public formats right now, for everything we do.
Large sections of the music industry are already moving away from DRM-based systems (e.g. the latest version of iTunes) and publishers should take note, and not go down the bad old routes, which, experience is beginning to show, don’t help anyone in the long run. The International Digital Publishing Forum published the latest version of their XML-based Open eBook Publication Structure Specification at the end of last year, and it scored its first victory a few weeks back with its inclusion in the new Adobe Digital Editions (although this still lays open the possibility of DRM).
Yes, we need to find ways to make sure that authors and others are paid for their work, but we also need to make sure that their works - as well as those pension records and that nuclear waste data - are accessible to future generations. We owe them that.
Image detail from Illuminated by Chronicity, reproduced under CC Licence.
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