Back in the mists of time, when we used to look things up in books, and not on Google, libraries were the first place we used to go. For many people, the person you turned to when you wanted to know something, was a librarian. They would direct you to the book, dictionary or other resource where you could find what you were looking for.

Libraries were also the place where we could wander, picking up books that appealed to us just because they looked interesting, browsing and moving on. Much like many people now use the Internet – wandering from source to source, reading a bit here and there and then moving on.

One would imagine that, in the digital age, libraries and online communities would meld really well, since, for many people, the process of (and pleasure they take in) finding information is the same. It hasn’t always been the case, though. Many libraries have resisted using and cataloguing on the internet, and many developers baulk at the volume of content, and prefer to look at ways of presenting new information, rather than reformatting information that already exists.

But the instances where libraries and developers have come together, the results have been spectacularly exciting. Google Book Search, LibraryThing, and Librivox are some of the examples. And now there is another one: an elegant, useful, totally comprehensive and exciting project called Open Library, a brainchild of the Internet Archive.

Due to launch in October, Open Library is the big daddy of online libraries – it’s a place where entire books are housed, as beautiful, elegant scans. You can see the illustrations and covers of books long out of print. You can also find the metadata about the book – in a pop-up that looks just like an old fashioned catalogue card, you can find a book’s ISBN number, publisher, date of publication, what collection the physical book belongs to, and where it was housed. It’s a phenomenal wealth of information, tailor-made for the bookworms and data-freaks.

But Open Library has taken this degree of access one step further. If a book is in the public domain, it is free to download, print and share from the site. Or you can send it to a third-party printer, who will print it for a nominal fee. If an audio version of the book exists, you can listen to it. And if you have a collection of your own public domain books, you can load them up onto the site. Books can be read in different viewers, and some of them will be offered on the $100 laptops for children around the world.

Open Library aims to, one day, include all books that have ever been published. That’s a huge task. At the moment, they’re partnering with over 30 different libraries, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Missouri Botanical Garden and the University of Toronto to scan and load all or part of their collections.

It’s a beautiful, exciting, inspiring project. iCommons spoke to Aaron Swartz, the Tech lead on the Open Library project, a man who reads a lot of books…


What was the initial impetus to start this very ambitious project?
I think the first inclinations I got toward it were when I was reading a magazine article and it gushed about some classic book. I went to find it on the Internet but the book was old and out of print so there was nothing. Amazon does carry out of print books and libraries don't have much more than a sentence. I wished there could be a site that had information about every book, not just the ones publishers were pushing at the time.

Digital libraries free up public domain books that often would never be noticed on a library shelf. This is important. But I wonder sometimes if these odd, sometimes wonderful, often obscure books don't just bog down digital libraries with oddities and clutter metadata?
Certainly we need to get better at search – at Open Library we're hoping to rank more highly books that have been reviewed in major papers and magazines, that lots of users buy or visit, that have lots of copies, etcetera. But there is still some joy in coming across an oddity, just like in a grand real library.

Open Library offers content, covers, different versions of the same text - where did you source all your scans from, and how long did it take to scan and upload them all?
The scans are being done our parent project, the Internet Archive – companies and libraries have been funding them to take books off their shelves and run them through the scanner. They've been at it for several years now.

Reading a book on Open Library is very easy and elegant, unlike some other digital libraries that are very clunky and rough. What factors influenced the design of this interface?
Thanks. We still have some ways to go with the book interface, but we wanted something that felt comfortable to read. We can do so much more with digital books that we thought we should try to make a reading experience that was even more comfortable than with paper.

How does the Internet Archive plan to keep a project like this sustainable?
We're hoping to get grants form library associations and make some money of book sale commissions. But our costs are surprisingly low.

I'm interested in the potential for online and traditional libraries to compliment each other as sources and repositories of knowledge. How does the Internet Archive see the Open Library complimenting and working with the libraries that have partnered in the project into the future?
We hope to push people towards libraries in their area. When they find a classic old book they want, we'll tell them which local libraries have a copy and how to get to them.

The official launch is in October. How many books are you planning to have uploaded for the launch?
We're hoping to have several hundred thousand with full text and tens of millions with catalogue records.

Book people are often a bit funny about where they read (by daylight, lamplight, sitting up, lying down…) Where do you like to read?
Heh. I find it hard to find a comfortable position. I usually switch between sitting up and lying down. I read all day on many occasions so I often have to go through the switch from daylight to lamplight.


If you visit Open Library before October, be aware that you will be looking at the demo site. Which is a lovely thing in itself, but not final. So keep your eyes open for their launch.

tags: Johannesburg South Africa culture library web-20 books archives knowledge

extracted from: