Hi Stephen -
Stephen Paling wrote:
> I like the idea of allowing user contributions to catalogs very much. It's past
> time for us to do that. I do have a couple of questions, though. How much do
> you know about the contributors to OpenLibrary? Do they tend to be
> librarians, or do they come from other backgrounds?
I only have qualitative observations really. We don't collect any sort of
demographics. I have noticed some people adding what I would call
library-specific metadata to records (more obscure fields like pagination etc).
There's one incredibly prolific editor, a bookshop called Fiction Addiction,
that's creating new edition records and adding covers for them all:
http://openlibrary.org/people/fictionaddiction
Then there's a few users like 98.202.166.27, who have a *deep* interest in a
subject area, in this case, Marriage Records. This person has added hundreds(?)
of new Works to the system, in their area of interest. I suspect there's a
relationship to the author of all these books.
http://openlibrary.org/recentchanges?ip=98.202.166.27
We're getting somewhere between 8,000-10,000 edits every week now. Woo! I can
probably count about 15 really prolific editors, with a very long tail of people
making one edit once. I have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the
edits too. And they're coming in a variety of languages too, which is Super Cool.
> It would be interesting
> to compare tagging by librarians and non-librarians.
You can spot the tags that have been created by professionals fairly easily -
they're mostly capitalized, and are mostly plurals :)
Most of the subjects we are associating with Works at the moment are derived
from librarians and catalogers. As I mentioned before, we "exploded" LCSH into
little pieces, and attached a URL to each one to open up browsing opportunites.
I like to think of that initial piece of work as using professionally created
metadata as a substrate, to be built upon.
I wrote a post somewhat related to this on the OL blog back in March:
http://blog.openlibrary.org/2010/03/02/comparing-two-classification-systems/
I love the idea of trying to encode the drift from officialdom to chaos. Mapping
the evolving nature of the subject data somehow. I don't think it's useful to
cast this sort of mapping as Librarians Vs The World though.
> Have you considered
> allowing users to add free-text abstracts rather than short tags?
Not sure if this is quite what you mean, but people can add a description of the
book at the Work level. Here's an example:
http://openlibrary.org/works/OL4305657W/Practica_music
"This book is by a 15th century music theorist of Milan Italy. It was very
influential and remains an excellent source for musical thinking in that era. It
is especially helpful in relating musical pitch to the muses and to the universe."
Seems pretty useful. A little more useful perhaps than "Microprint copy
(positive) made from the original in the Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of
Music. 5 cards." in terms of providing information on what the book is actually
*about*. You can also see from this anonymous editor's Recent Changes page that
they've just lobbed on to Open Library, looked for a book they like (and
therefore know something about) and have edited that one record. Cognitive
Surplus, indeed. If everyone in the world did this about a book they love, we'd
be golden!
http://openlibrary.org/recentchanges?ip=184.35.34.232
I've also noticed a review implied in an abstract, which I think has interesting
potential. Without us building any structure to collect reviews, they're
beginning to emerge all by themselves.
Cheers,
george
Received on Thu Jul 01 2010 - 14:45:58 EDT