Frequently Asked Questions

How is this different from Project Gutenberg?

Project Gutenberg provides text files of a select number of out-of-copyright books. Our goal is to list every book -- whether in-print or out-of-print, available at a bookstore or a library, scanned or typed in as text. We provide pointers to Gutenberg texts as well as Internet Archive scans as well as Amazon downloads or library borrowing.

Have you heard of WorldCat? Have you talked to OCLC?

The OpenLibrary project is an opensource project of the Internet Archive. This is important because the OpenLibrary project has many participants that do not work for and are not directed by the Internet Archive. That said the Internet Archive has been working to provide resources, such as databases, to the OpenLibrary project.

A major difference between OCLC and the OpenLibrary is that OCLC is building a catalog to share among libraries, while OpenLibrary is building a catalog to share with the public, with the hope that this will get more people involved in using libraries.

The Internet Archive and OCLC have discussed working together, and hopefully this will yield a joint project, but nothing has been finalized yet. The plans for the OpenLibrary have been actively shared with OCLC and its records are available to OCLC.

Leveraging the records in WorldCat could mean several things:

1. pointing to WorldCat from the OpenLibrary site
   
2. getting records from libraries
   
3. getting records from OCLC

Option (1) has the advantage that it can be done with no agreements, but there would be no integrated user experience like there is at wikipedia, amazon.com, or IMDB. Options (2) and (3) are being pursued.

For background, the Internet Archive had a longstanding deal with the Research Libraries Group (RLG) to make RLG digitized book records (as well as other Internet Archive records) available for free with no restrictions. With RLG now part of OCLC, this deal continues. To date, the Internet Archive has generally retrieved records from the source library's catalog rather than RLG because of the preference of the source library. These records from the Internet Archive have been integrated into the Open Library site.

The Internet Archive's catalog is available using the Open Archives Initiative protocol, and in bulk from the Mellon funded OAIster project, which was designed for metadata harvesting.

Which book classifications system will you use? Dewey? LC? Tags?

All of the above. We want to have as much classifying information as possible, so that people and libraries can use whichever mechanisms they like.