Open Library, which went live this month with records on 20 million books, aims to someday give its users access to every book ever published. According to Openlibrary.org, it plans to do this by providing online full-text of out-of-copyright books and links to libraries and bookstores for newer books. Its records come mostly from the Library of Congress and from various publishers.

 

One of the main challenges facing sites like Open Library is copyright, Horny explained.

 

“It can only provide free access to those in the public domain (no longer copyright protected),” Horny said. “That eliminates free access to most books published in the last 75 years. This is the same challenge faced by Google’s Book Search project that has already partnered with a number of large libraries, including those at the University of Michigan, Stanford and Harvard, to scan their collections. Because of copyright, search access only allows viewing of very small portions of those books’ actual texts at present.”

 

What’s more, the catalog information Open Library would provide is already available through WorldCat, a subscription service provided to libraries through the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC).

 

“OCLC’s WorldCat.org, now in beta with free registration, allows access to some 99 million bibliographic records, recording over 1.2 billion holdings, in standard format” said Horny. “This is by far the most complete database of library holdings world-wide. While libraries do in fact pay to copy these records into their own catalogs and to add their own holdings information to the combined catalog, they also benefit tremendously from sharing work and having excellent inter-library loan access to each other’s collections.”

 

The difference, according to Open Library’s mission statement, is that WorldCat’s catalog shares records among libraries—though WorldCat is experimenting with free public access for individuals—while Open Library is building a catalog to share with the public. And this is where another concern arises: since Open Library aims to maintain its site Wikipedia-style, through the public, will it be able to maintain credibility?

 

“First, there is the basic fact that anything open to alteration by anyone is very subject to errors,” said Horny. “Such sites are also prone to getting points of view from someone’s personal agenda. For book catalogs, this public input feature of Internet sites is very much like having a giant online book discussion group that might be an extension of what you could experience with a small gathering of your neighbors who have all chosen to read a particular book. It can certainly be fun to exchange views if you understand that that is what is going on.”

 

Overall, Horny stresses that users simply need to understand what Open Library is about before they use it, and to know its limitations.

 

“The Open Library is based on the old-fashioned idea of the library as being mostly books,” she said. “This concept basically overlooks journals. When you think about what MSU students and faculty use particularly heavily in their research, it’s our licensed full-text access to over 20,000 journals, enabling them to read (and print) the most up-to-date articles, as well as an extensive array of articles from older journals. These materials are mainly under copyright and MSU’s libraries, like all other libraries, pay for access.”