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« Brainiac 2.0 | Main | Fascinating Islamofascism » Monday, October 22, 2007Open Library talk tomorrow"What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book -- a key part of our planet's cultural legacy." Such a library ought to be online; it ought to be "grandly comprehensive"; and it ought to be "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." So wrote Aaron Swartz, this past July, on the website of the Open Library project.  Swartz, a self-described activist, writer, and hacker who lives in Cambridge, was mentioned by the Globe last year in an article on local Wikipedians. Before that, at age 14, he was a co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification (RSS makes it possible to syndicate blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts); and in 2005, he co-founded the social news ranking website Reddit.com now owned by Conde Nast; he was 18 at the time. The Open Library is off to a promising start already. Earlier this year, Swartz and others located a copy of the Library of Congress card catalog, phoned publishers and asked them for their data, created a brand new database infrastructure for handling millions of dynamic records, wrote a new type of wiki that lets users enter structured data, set up a search engine to look through it all, and made the resulting site look good. Now, they've opened up the demo website, the source code, and the mailing lists. Like Jane Horrock's supermarket manager-turned-British prime minister (in the Masterpiece Theatre miniseries "The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard," which I watched last night whenever the Red Sox were making me nervous), the Open Library team is including the public in the decision-making process. Want to get involved? Swartz will be speaking about the Open Library, at the Berkman Center in Cambridge, tomorrow at 12:30 pm. RSVP is required by noon today. Via Joho the Blog Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:02 AM
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