Someone asked me during one of my talks if I knew of any projects that were actually trying to open source cataloging records and the idea of authority records. I said I didn’t, not really. It’s a weird juxtaposition, the idea of authority and the idea of a collaborative project that anyone can work on and modify. I knew there were some folks at the Internet Archive working on something along those lines, but the project was under wraps for quite some time. Now, it’s not. Its called Open Library and it’s in demo mode. You can examine it and I encourage you to do that and give lots of feedback to the developers. Make sure to check the “about the librarianship” page
Imagine a library that collected all the world’s information about all the world’s books and made it available for everyone to view and update. We’re building that library.
How cool! I just sent an e-mail offering up our unique local history records, and would encourage other out-of-the-way libraries with special collections to do the same. What a wonderful alternative to WorldCat!