“It is about sharing as openly as possible — and that’s really liberating ... we’re almost a non-threat to the rest of the Web, because we’re not keeping the property,” she said.
Oates knows a thing or two about sharing objects online. For the past few years, the Australian was one of the leading lights at the popular photo Website Flickr — spending four years as lead designer, before moving to a role that included projects such as the Commons: a scheme to use Flickr as a window on publicly held photography collections.
The lessons from her previous work are carrying through to the project in obvious ways — a redesign is being mooted to make the site more palatable to those who don’t have a degree in library science. But she is also hoping to introduce some sense of serendipity or exploration to the records.
“Right now it’s about search and retrieve, and there’s no sense of browsing or skipping around,” she said. “In the future we can start to do queries like ‘show me all the popular subjects that were written about in 1934.’ You can start to trend that over time, look at peaks and troughs in areas of interest. The data’s all there, but it’s about making connections that are inferred by the data itself — I’m really excited by that.”
Propagating that idea could be made more difficult by Google, which last week revamped its book search to make it a more sleek and social experience. Oates said she doesn’t see that in adversarial terms, however.
“The book search on Google is awesome — they’ve thrown a shitload of computing power at it, and you can see books that mention things, Websites that mention those books and books on a map. It’s useful, but it’s really clinical,” she said.
Oates won’t say any more about Google, but her colleagues are less reticent. Peter Brantley, the archive’s director of access, has been a vocal critic of the company’s plans — even going as far as calling Google’s attempt to gain exemption against future copyright claims as “disgusting.”
There is certainly a tension between the two schemes, partially because their intentions are so similar while their approaches are so different. But, while Google has the backing of many publishers, who see the chance to make some extra cash in the deal, one crucial ally for OL may be the academic world.
If the scheme gives researchers and students the chance to use OL in their work — referring to an OL page as a citation source, or building a bibliography using its tools — they could get a core audience that spreads the concept. Plus, of course, the idea is that Open Library will remain just that — open — forever.
“The longevity of the work that we’re doing is a bit of a culture shock, and a really curious solution to provide,” she said. “How do we write stuff to disk that’s going to be retrievable in 1,000 years?”
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