Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Open Library Project

The Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive and partially funded by a grant from the California State Library. The goal of the Open Library is to provide one web page for every book ever published. So far the library has collected over 30 million searchable bibliographic records (20 million are available), built a database to store them, and made available over one million full-text digitized books.

Book records come from a variety of libraries, publishers and other digital content repositories. Another goal of the Open Library is to create a new metadata schema for bibliographic records: the project has a working group for those interested in discussing the metadata to be included in the records beyond MARC data.

The Open Library, true to its name, is an open project and is actively soliciting volunteer help from librarians, programmers and book enthusiasts. I'm curious to see where this project goes and whether the futurelib metadata schema achieves widespread adoption in the library and book publishing industries.

No comments:

Post a Comment