At only 21, Aaron Swartz is attempting to turn the library world upside down. He is taking on the subscription-based WorldCat, the largest bibliographic database on the planet, by building a free online book catalog that anyone can update.
Many academic librarians are wary of Mr. Swartz’s project because it will allow nonlibrarians, who may be prone to errors, to catalog books.
But some young librarians are rallying around the precocious entrepreneur because his work may 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,” said Jeremy A. Frumkin, director of emerging technologies and services at Oregon State University. Mr. Swartz does have a track record that inspires hope. At 14 he helped write RSS, a popular Web tool used to alert people to new blog posts. While still a teenager he became wealthy after Condé Nast Publications bought Reddit, the Web site he had helped build that lets users rank news and other electronic content. Now his passion is a modern library. “I saw all these great books locked up in the stacks of libraries,” Mr. Swartz said. “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.”
The new catalog project, Open Library, is set to 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 page will include not just author, title, and publisher but also links that direct users to the nearest library with a copy and to related books. Other links will allow users to buy a book online or write a review of it.
The pages will be created or updated by anyone, in the style of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Some Web pages will also connect to the full text when its copyright has expired. Or users will be able to pay about 10 cents a page to have an unscanned out-of-copyright book at a college library digitized.
The Open Library is backed by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, which gave the project $300,000 this year and will provide the full texts of materials in its own collection. (The Open Content Alliance, a book-digitization project, is another partner.)
Read more at the Chronicle of Higher Education site.