Interestingly, I’d been thinking about sea changes in technology that necessitate an abrupt shift to a different way of viewing printed material. I’ve been reading (more like picking at) The Archimedes Codex which has an interesting section on the shift from books stored as rolls to books stored as codices. In the 4th and 5th centuries, everything that was in use was transferred to codex form and the scrolls discarded – in many cases this resulted in the loss of ancient works that had, essentially, not been checked out of the library recently.
Anyway, Josh Glenn, a FOP since before it was popular or profitable, stopped by the shop and was telling me about Open Library. They, like Google Books and the Internet Archive (with whom they’re affiliated) propose to move the worlds books one last time – onto the internet – hopefully, this time, without losing too much. Initially I wasn’t that impressed – I have a knee jerk negative reaction to any attempts to digitize books and turn them into shifty computer images – and wondered what the point was. Google is scanning everything they can get their hands on, and OCLC and bibliographies like the English Short Title Catalog are readily available. After he left, I realized that, like many things, if left to people like me, civilization would never advance. There is, sometimes at least, something to be said for striving for better than good enough.
So I checked out the site (still just a demo), and they do seem to have developed some technology that puts them above the likes of google, both from a databasing and an aesthetic standpoint. While I appreciate the title pages of scarce books that google has been able to put in front of me, the Open Library interface is much more aesthetically pleasing and you might even be able to read a few chapters without going loco. The idea appears to be to merge the power in numbers of sites like wikipedia with the valuable book info and scans collected in libraries (though why use A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius as your example??? Those McSweeney’s cats have their claws in everything) – putting all available info on one screen.
Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. Even when the full text of a book wasn’t available, 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.
We’ll see how it turns out – I have some questions about how it’s going to work letting the community do bibliography, an activity fraught with peril for even the most anal of researchers, and I’m not sure what bibliographies they are initially going to be adding info from – certainly the ESTC and Blanck’s Bibliography of American Literature would be a great start – but the framework certainly seems promising. Also, the links to places the books can be bought suggests that we might be able to squeeze the old used bookstore into this future after all – just link to an aggregator like bookfinder, or, better yet, build a better one of those as well.
[...] Some musings about the future of the book, digitization and a truly open library from Tom at Pazzo Books. [...]