A library bigger than any building
By Giles Turnbull

An ambitious project to create an online catalogue of every book in every language ever published is under way. Public goodwill is not in doubt, but some libraries remain to be convinced.

A few years ago, the idea of getting random people around the world to write their own encyclopaedia would have been madness - but that didn't stop the founders of Wikipedia doing just that, and it has turned out to be one of the most successful web projects of recent years.

With that in mind, does it sound mad to want to try and build an online catalogue of every book ever published, anywhere in the world?

The Open Library, newly launched in the USA but global in scope, is designed to make that happen.

In the words of its creators, the idea is to build a virtual library that stores details of not just "every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English; but simply every book."

Which would include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time , The Koran , the full text of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , and of course Harry Potter .

It's kind of a bad idea for one commercial site to be the definitive source for book information on the internet
Aaron Swartz on Amazon
But what's the Open Library really for? Aaron Swartz, leader of the technical team working on Open Library, suggests that every book ever published needs a single authoritative page on the internet, a bit like a personal homepage.

"Right now, if you want to link to a book on the web, the main place people go is Amazon. It's kind of a bad idea for one commercial site to be the definitive source for book information on the internet, so we want to have a site that brings together information from commercial publishers, reviewers, users, libraries, everywhere.

"This site will become the place where you can find interesting books and information about them, whether they're in print, out of print, out of copyright or whatever."

Such a library has to be virtual. No building would ever be large enough to house all books; no single group or government could afford to build it, or employ the necessary staff. If the Open Library is to succeed, it has to be a virtual space, and open to everyone, Wikipedia-style.

"There are tons of books out there and tons of information about those books. There's no way even a large group of librarians is going to be able to collect it all. We think of it as an analogue to Wikipedia. There are some great encyclopaedias written by small groups of experts, but to get something as wide-ranging and varied as Wikipedia, you need to let everyone in."

To start things off, the Open Library is calling on other libraries to donate their catalogues. This alone presents huge technical challenges, since the data sets come in different formats and different languages, and each set comes with its own quirks, repetitions and errors.

What's important is keeping the data in a structured form, so that the database working behind the scenes knows the difference between an author, a title and a publisher.

"We had to build this new type of wiki software which was an exciting challenge, because you had to set it up so that instead of just having one kind of page people can edit, we have lots of different kinds.

"People can edit authors, they can edit books, they can edit text pages, and so on. So there's a lot of new stuff we had to build. And that's just the infrastructure - there were also lots of things to import, and book data to merge and make searchable."

Google similarities

An Open Library page is meant to be as comprehensive as possible.

There are data fields for every possible bit of information that could exist about each published work. If copyright allows, there will be a copy of the book to download, or links to copies of it elsewhere (such as the Gutenberg Project to digitise cultural works).

For the time being, funding comes from the Internet Archive, another non-profit project that has the simple aim of keeping copies of the internet for the benefit of generations to come. But in future, the Open Library will depend on donations and taking a cut of any book sales it hands over to the big online booksellers.

Income will matter more in the face of commercial competition. The Google Books Library Project, part of the larger Google Book Search service, has broadly similar aims.

The Google Book Search Library Project sets out "to work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalogue of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers,"

Naturally, Google has its own commercial interests to protect and invest in. The Open Library's approach is the opposite, committed as it is to the ultimate in freedom of information acts: not only can anyone browse, search, and read the books in its catalogue - they can re-write the catalogue itself as they go.

But while the rise of Wikipedia proves there is no shortage of enthusiasm among the public to build informative sites for general consumption, not all libraries are signed up to the Open Library ethos, including the British Library.

Malicious alterations?

Stephen Bury, head of European and American Collections at the British Library in London, has some reservations about contributing to the Open Library project.

"In the short term, I don't think we will send them a copy of our catalogue. We only have limited resources and we need them to concentrate their efforts on our own digitisation projects," he says.

"We have always supported digitisation, and the more the merrier. But there's some scepticism as to whether one day the Open Library might become a commercial site with adverts and so on."

Mr Bury was not keen on the idea of allowing ordinary people to edit library catalogues themselves.

"I think there's a need for balance and some degree of control. You might get people maliciously changing things."

Here is a selection of your comments.

I think it is a bad idea for a lot of small book writers and indeed I could see objections from large book publishers. This is basically asking for books to be pirated in the same way in which MP3's and DVD's are online. What is going to happen to all the local book shops that make a living out of selling such products. Would there be a need to ever actually go into a book shop again if you could get them online?
Kevin Conti, Glasgow

I think its a great idea to digitalise all public info and making it free to the world. We still have a lot of other problems to solve in making the world a better place though
Steiner1800, KL, Malaysia

In a similar fashion to Wikipedia, the ability for any member of the public to alter information will inadvertently lead to errors, however, again similarly to Wikipedia the external links will be pretty good, and the scale of the project if concieved will certainly be impressive. I personally think if the makers can efficiently pull it off, it will become as big as Wikipedia is, but in the literature world as well as beyond. Good luck!
Jack Burrows, Ipswich. England

The British Library... what hypocrites. Only these literary priests understand the intricacies of knowledge eh? A degree of control is required? Is that, what was said, when the printing press was invented, and the masses could read the Bible in their own language, and not depend on one of those priests, to tell them what was said, isn't the British Library doing the same thing? Long live Knowledge.
rebecca , San Francisco, CA. USA

So is this going to include catalogues of books which are out of print, rare books, pamphlets which appear in library catalogues, journals, and other published material, or is it going to be limited to books alone? If this is ever completed within my lifetime, I'll eat my Harry Potter set - yes, all seven of them including the covers.
Fiona, Aberdeen, Scotland

I love the idea of having access to every book ever published! However, as was pointed out by Mr. Bury, if you have the average person editing a library catalogue what are librarians going to university for? There is a reason that 'Librarian' is a profession. It may seem like an easy job but it is in fact a profession that requires years of education. If this could indeed be overseen by some professionals and kept as a free site that would be wonderful, but it is extremely ambitious. Best of Luck!
Brandi , Los Angeles, CA, USA

People just don't get it. "I think there's a need for balance and some degree of control. You might get people maliciously changing things." Duh. You will get people maliciously changing things, and the system survives the damage remarkably well and serves the public much better than the orders-of-magnitude smaller libraries that are highly quality controlled, or even the collection of all such libraries put together, as Wikipedia has already demonstrated in the parallel realm of encyclopaedias. They [the British Library] suffer from presentism: they're concerned only with trying to figure out how to do what they currently do better instead of taking revolutionary steps made possible by the new medium of the Internet.
Cristobal Palmer, Chapel Hill, NC USA

It wont be a complete catalogue of all books, the Roman Catholic church made sure of that. I wouldn't worry so much about the individual maliciously changing entries but having one organization holding all the information,who polices who?
Ian, Southampton

The comments about the global project made by Mr. Stephen Bury are reasonable enough to take into consideration. He speaks from experience, and more than likely, a lifetime of reading about library history. Most people, when interconnected or given a chance to represent their voice in a collective, will use that opportunity to alter and manipulate the facts. For example, a person who adores the works of an author such as Toni Morrison and shares a similar background or physicality as the author will promote that writer biasedly. Maintaining a fair virtual write-up of a book on a global network would need to be filtered so that misconceptions can be avoided. Back to Toni Morrison, it would take a most unlikely fan, say from Western China, to give the public a logical view of the book "Sula". Shared information can only go so far and when it is given to anyone with access to a computer, the probability of distorting that information is at a higher percentage.
Joshua Lewis, Austin, TX USA