Ben Gimpert is a friend of the Open Library. He and I got together over lunch a few months ago to talk about big data, statistical natural language processing, and extracting meaning from Open Library programmatically. His efforts are beginning to bear some really interesting fruit, and while we work out how we might be able to present it online, we thought you might be interested to hear what he’s been up to…
Tag Archives: Library
jQuery Magic Goes Upstream
When we started to re-design Open Library, we knew that we wanted to make it not only useful, but fun to use as well. Obviously, its usefulness as a resource is dependent on its data, the data integrity, and the participation of interested people like you who want to help to build and maintain an online library for everyone to use now and in the future.
Announcing the Open Library redesign
Screenshot on Flickr – CC Attribution
Hooray! And yay! We’re very excited to announce the “soft launch” of our brand new Open Library site! This is version 1 of a reconstructed Open Library, and we’re going to keep it “soft” at a special URL until we’re sure it’s stable enough to make the final transition to openlibrary.org. We’re hoping that will happen soon.
As we mentioned in two previous blog posts [1][2], the main features of the new design are:
Comparing two classification systems
From the Goddard Space Flight Center , CC Attribution 2.0 Generic
As you may have seen in our recent Sneak Peek post, we’ve been working on new ways to allow you to browse subject headings in Open Library. Edward’s just built a new subject search index too, so you’ll be able to do a keyword search for any/all subject headings that mention that word.
Testing things and looking around, I wondered about comparison between two different systems of classification: Library of Congress Subject Headings (or Authorities) and Flickr tags.
Modern Library Metadata
The Open Library team is lucky to work with Karen Coyle, our resident metadata czar.
Karen recently completed an article called Understanding the Semantic Web: bibliographic data and metadata. The full article is issued in Library Technology Reports, v. 46, Issue 1, January 2010, which you can purchase, but there’s also a PDF chapter online: