One web page for every book ever published. It’s a lofty, but achievable, goal.
To build it, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a brand new database infrastructure for handling huge amounts of dynamic information, a wiki interface, multi-language support, and people who are willing to contribute their time, effort, and book data.
Coming to the news of OpenLibrary’s integration with Flickr…
Via booktwo.org
And now this exciting move has borne some fascinating fruit: OpenLibrary Machine Tags on Flickr. Machine tags are machine-readable versions of the ubiquitous tag system that Flickr and now many, many sites use to describe and organise content.
Machine tags are an incredibly important link in the bookdata chain, as they allow us to harness bookdata across any number of services.
So the uptake is pretty low at the moment (80 at the current count), but I’ve been tagging my books on Flickr – covers, graphic interiors and text – and I’ll be watching to see what uses there are.
I think it’s really important we start moving beyond covers as the defining “image” of a book – so in particular, I hope people start tagging interior photos. I’m also aware of the possible uses at projects like the Book Seer and bkkeepr (as Tom notes), so… well, we’ll wait and see…
Read the entire article here.Image Source