ACM TechNews

An Upstart Web Catalog Challenges an Academic-Library Giant

Chronicle of Higher Education (02/22/08) Vol. 54, No. 24, P. A11; Foster, Andrea L.

Aaron Swartz's Open Library project, a free online book catalog that anyone can update, could challenge the subscription-based WorldCat, the world's largest bibliographic database. Many academic librarians are wary of the Open Library project because it will allow nonlibrarians to catalog books. However, others say the Open Library could make their collections more visible on the Web. "It really provides the potential for libraries to leap forward in terms of working with electronic books and collections of electronic books," says Oregon State University emerging technologies and services director Jeremy A. Frumkin. Swartz, only 21, already has helped write the popular RSS Web tool and helped build Reddit, a Web site that lets users rank news and other electronic content. "I saw all these great books locked up in the stacks of libraries," Swartz says. "But nobody ever found out about them, because they didn't have a spot on the Web, and people weren't browsing the stacks anymore." Open Library will go live in early March with records on 20 million books. The goal is to create a comprehensive Web page about any book ever published. Each book page will include basic information such as the author, title, and publisher, as well as links to the nearest library with a copy. There will also be links to related books, user review areas, and places to buy the book online. Following the Wikipedia model, the pages can be created or updated by anyone.

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i24/24a01101.htm

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