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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 > > > -- ----------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------