El proyecto Open Library

Buscando material de un libro de Ricardo Mercado Luna, lo encontré en el proyecto Open Library, parte del mayor proyecto The Internet Archive. "Open..." implica una invitación a completar la información sobre cada autor incluído, que extiendo a quienquiera que desee difundir mejor a sus autores preferidos. Creo que seguiré la invitación. Esta es la introducción de Open Library, en sus propias palabras:

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.

To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books.

Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone! This is an Open project - the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and the site is open.

Now it's your turn! Everyone can participate in this project, whether you're a programmer who wants to build on top of this data, a librarian who wants to add records of digitized books to her local catalog, or a lover of books who wants to make sure his favorites are well represented.

Esta iniciativa se puede incluír en el conjunto liderado por el Proyecto Gutenberg, orientado en este caso al material de uso libre, sin derechos de autor o ya caducados. Si Ray Bradbury advirtiera el impacto de esfuerzos como éstos, probablemente cambiaría radicalmente su opinión sobre Internet...