One web page for every book

The Open Library is a web-based library catalogue which is designed to hold the details of every book ever published. Book data has been contributed by libraries worldwide and has been added to data from the internet to reach a total of 23+ million records. The number is constantly increasing as new data is contributed every week. The site is in the form of a wiki (like Wikipedia) which means records can also be added - and edited - by the public.

The Open Library is part of the Internet Archive; a non-profit digital archiving organisation based in San Francisco. The archive also runs a book scanning project to make the text of out-of-copyright books available on the web which is linked to the Open Library. Specially developed book scanners have been placed in libraries around the world and so far over one million books have been scanned and the text linked to corresponding records in the Open Library. This talk will look at different aspects of the Open Library, our progress so far and the challenges ahead.

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