Thanks, Ed. Some of this is a bit over my head, but I'll pass it along
to those to whom it will make sense.
There is every intention to make the OL data available in
machine-readable formats -- there's the usual problem of not having
enough time to implement everything with a small programming staff.
There's a lot of focus on the Archive's digitized books and creating
good reading software, among other things. The current APIs are "least
effort" services for that very reason.
I asked about COinS because it's something I have vague knowledge of.
(And I assume it isn't too difficult to implement.) However, if there
are other services that would make a bigger difference, I invite you
(all) to speak up. It makes little sense to have this large quantity of
bib data if it isn't widely and easily usable.
kc
Ed Summers wrote:
> Hi Karen:
>
> I definitely think adding COinS to OpenLibrary pages could make sense.
> I'm curious what everyone's use case is. Is it mainly browser plugins
> that can inject links to a relevant OpenURL router so that you can
> find books in your local context? If so I think use of COinS in
> OpenLibrary makes a lot of sense.
>
> There is an orthogonal use case of making structured metadata
> available via a book display. I'd personally prefer to see web pages
> for books include auto-discovery links for alternate machine readable
> representations. This is how blogs are typically tied to their atom
> and/or rss syndication feeds.
>
> For example if the web page for Weaving the Web [1] could include
> something like:
>
> <head>
> <link rel="alternate" type="application/json"
> href="http://openlibrary.org/api/get?key=/b/OL7290708M" />
> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rdf+xml"
> href="http://openlibrary.org/b/OL7290708M.rdf" />
> ...
> </head>
>
> The JSON one works now of course, the RDF one is hypothetical. A
> consuming application like Zotero (or a web crawler) could then use
> simple auto-discovery to find the machine readable data. Another
> alternative would be to use RDFa to interleave metadata into the HTML
> display itself. We have nice things like the Bibliographic Ontology,
> and the emerging RDA vocabulary that you are working on which would
> fold right into these RDF representations. This machine readable
> metadata could also link to things like the PDF, table-of-contents,
> etc where appropriate.
>
> It would be great if Brewster's idea of "a web-page for every book"
> could also mean machine readable metadata for every book. OpenLibrary
> has a rich database available behind it it, and it seems a shame not
> to expose it in the HTML in a web-friendly way.
>
> //Ed
>
> [1] http://openlibrary.org/b/OL7290708M
>
>
>
--
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
[log in to unmask] http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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