tag VS openlibrary

Nature + Identifiers is an issue (e.g. see https://github.com/tdwg/tag/issues/36). I've routinely mentioned to others in my field to look at other industries for ways forward, particularly ones like the music industry, so its interesting, if unsurprising to see all the same problems arise there. For those who know, in our field, when Identifiers comes up in conversation at conferences etc., we tiptoe away, somehow people can't learn from the past issues.

There are two issues that keep coming up in my mind 1) People want Identifiers to do something (like resolve), rather than just be identifiers and 2) People think that there are such things as "unique" identifiers (one identifier per "thing"). Neither, in my mind, are the purpose of identifiers. Identifiers should do one thing, localize you to some concept. By localize I mean that if you can find the digital space (or in physical collections where identifiers are used the physical "printed" identifier) that "contains" the identifier then you should have a reasonable probability of finding the thing/concept that identifier is for. That's all. No certainty, no uniqueness. It's very akin to what we do when we cite something in a publication, we are giving the research a reasonable chance of finding the origin. This isn't to say that we shouldn't try to keep identifiers unique though, it's to say that when it comes down to crunch time we should never assume 1) they are unique, and 2) that their special properties (e.g. that they resolve) actually work.

I've seen numerous identifier schemes come and go, we've specifically designed a 1-many for our things-to-identifiers in our systems (sitting on top our internal IDs). DOIs? They must be unique, right? Nope. Institutional CODENs? Nope (though the botanists have done it pretty well through community peer-pressure).

As others have noted, identifiers really are just labels, though things like UUIDs have the game-changing property ofreducing the probability that you're looking at a homonymous label.

I'd like to make a pitch for Openlibrary.org the free online library from Internet Archive that includes a fulltext search of millions of books.

I've been volunteering with them on and off for several years and it's always a lovely experience. Their backend is python and frontend mostly from python templates and some Vue for librarian stuff.

Every Tuesday they have a call on Zoom that everyone is welcome to join to share what they're working on, ask for help, and generally chat a bit. It's a great time.

Depending on what you're interested in there's a lot to do from helping build import pipelines for more book entries, writing bots to cleanup data, Performance improvements, better documenting public APIs, etc

I'm currently slowly working on a wikidata integration for their authors page. We also could use some help upgrading to Vue 3, mentors for Google summer of code would be helpful, find of ML projects needing help, moving away from old jQuery libraries, etc.

They can be quite responsive to PRs too like I blogged about here: https://blog.rayberger.org/idea-to-merged-in-less-than-30-mi...

For example, here's a small issue that could use some help on the python side: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/8928

OpenLibrary does provide search access to full texts. For example: https://openlibrary.org/search/inside?q=%22institutional+thi...

It is open source and they're always looking for contributors. I think they'd especially welcome help improving search!

https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/

Check out https://openlibrary.org. You can search ´library science’, librarian’, etc, and something should come up. Just select the ‘ebooks’ option to search for items within the collection. And you can narrow the search by subject, etc.

Right now I'm in the middle of the chicken and the egg problem where we don't have enough authors cataloging their publications and b/c of that obviously readers are not interested in using the site.

I've gone back and forth with taking Open Libray's [0] catalog as that would at least flesh out our collection of books but then I'd have to deal with verifying authors to accounts so they can access their books. Which sounds like a major headache and also just defeats the concept of building a community.

Since this is really a weekend project, I'm just going to keep building the tools out to perfection and hope people will trickle in over time.

Luckily for me I just want to write, so the tools I'm building are exactly what works for my writing goals and I think overtime others will find the same value.

[0] https://openlibrary.org

Here's one: https://openlibrary.org/

The Internet Archive runs what they call the Open Library, which is a unique concept on the traditional library. You can sign-up with minimal details and digitally check out many scanned books from libraries all over the world. The only caveat is that almost all of the books are older editions - ones that would be impossible to find locally. It's great if you're looking for old routes, a look back in time, details about obscure areas, or just prefer to read a book rather than browse AllTrails. Please do still support local authors whenever you can as guidebooks take hundreds of hours to create and are slowly going extinct.

Repo : https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary