Open Library

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Screenshot, book by Frederick Macaulay

Open Library is a project designed to create a comprehensive online database of books. It is a project of the Internet Archive. Aaron Swartz was the leader of the Open Library's technical team.[1][2] The project is now led by George Oates.

Book information is collected from the Library of Congress catalog, Amazon.com, as well as from user contributions through a Wiki-like interface. If a book has been scanned by the Internet Archive, a button labeled "Read Online" will appear next to its cover image. Also, a link to the corresponding Google Books page may be provided in the sidebar, which will also work for non-Public Domain works.

The site uses Infobase, its own database framework based on PostgreSQL, and Infogami, its own Wiki engine written in Python.[3] Open Library's content is in the public domain, while the source code to the site is published under the Affero General Public License, version 3.[4][5]

Open Library claims to have 30 million items in its database, 20 million of which are accessible on-line, and about one million Public Domain books are available as scans.[6]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6924022.stm
  2. ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/22/library-search-engines-books
  3. ^ http://openlibrary.org/about/tech
  4. ^ http://openlibrary.org/about/license
  5. ^ http://github.com/openlibrary/openlibrary/tree/master/LICENSE
  6. ^ http://openlibrary.org/about

[edit] External links

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