Open Library, really open. Aaron Swartz discusses.

Posted in books | Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 | 3 Comments »
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David Weinberger blogs about Aaron Swartz talking at the Berkman Center about the Open Library project. Pay close attention to the Q and A and think about this in terms of the Google Books post/article from yesterday. Who is really in faveor of openness? Who talks the most about openness? Want to help? They still need programmers. And book lovers.

Q: Why won’t OCLC give you the data?
A: We’d take it in any form. We’d be willing to pay. Getting through the library bureaucracy is difficult…
A: (terry) You need to find the right person at OCLC
A: We’ve talked with them at a high level and they won’t give us any information. Too bad since they’re a non-profit. Library records are not copyrightable. OCLC contractually binds libraries.

job opening: data munger needed for Open Library project

Posted in requests | Saturday, August 18th, 2007 | Comments Off
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I rarely post links to job here because it seems to me that most postings for library jobs are more or less the same. This one is different. The Open Library project, which I linked to here before, is looking for some new folks. You’d be working with a fun team of geniuses, most notably Karen Coyle who is the chief librarian of the project. Telecommuting an option. Interested? Read the job description, then email Aaron and tell him you heard about it here.

Tasks include: working with our chief librarian, Karen Coyle, to implement algorithms to do data merging and other processing tasks; writing scrapers and crawlers to grab various data sources; writing importers to parse this data into something that can be imported into our database; and managing all the people who want to help us with these tasks.