The E-Sylum:  Volume 10, Number 31, August 5, 2007, Article 4

THE OPEN LIBRARY PROJECT

Stephen Pradier forwarded an article about the Open Library project,
which if successful, could become a useful source for numismatic
information:

"An ambitious project to create an online catalogue of every book
in every language ever published is under way. Public goodwill is
not in doubt, but some libraries remain to be convinced.

"A few years ago, the idea of getting random people around the
world to write their own encyclopaedia would have been madness -
but that didn't stop the founders of Wikipedia doing just that,
and it has turned out to be one of the most successful web
projects of recent years.

"With that in mind, does it sound mad to want to try and build
an online catalogue of every book ever published, anywhere in
the world?

"The Open Library, newly launched in the USA but global in scope,
is designed to make that happen.

"In the words of its creators, the idea is to build a virtual
library that stores details of not just 'every book on sale,
or every important book, or even every book in English; but
simply every book.'

"Aaron Swartz, leader of the technical team working on Open
Library, suggests that every book ever published needs a single
authoritative page on the internet, a bit like a personal
homepage.

"'Right now, if you want to link to a book on the web, the main
place people go is Amazon. It's kind of a bad idea for one commercial
site to be the definitive source for book information on the internet,
so we want to have a site that brings together information from
commercial publishers, reviewers, users, libraries, everywhere.

"'This site will become the place where you can find interesting
books and information about them, whether they're in print, out
of print, out of copyright or whatever.'"

To read the complete article, see:
Complete Article

To visit the Open Library web site, see:
http://www.openlibrary.org/

  Wayne Homren, Editor

	coinbooks.org Web

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