An Upstart Web Catalog Challenges an Academic-Library Giant
From the Chronicle of Higher Education

By ANDREA L. FOSTER

At only 21, Aaron Swartz is attempting to turn the library world upside down. He is taking on the subscription-based WorldCat, the largest bibliographic database on the planet, by building a free online book catalog that anyone can update.

Many academic librarians are wary of Mr. Swartz's project because it will allow nonlibrarians, who may be prone to errors, to catalog books. But some young librarians are rallying around the precocious entrepreneur because his work may make their collections more visible on the Web. "It really provides the potential for libraries to leap forward in terms of working with electronic books and collections of electronic books," said Jeremy A. Frumkin, director of emerging technologies and services at Oregon State University.

Mr. Swartz does have a track record that inspires hope. At 14 he helped write RSS, a popular Web tool used to alert people to new blog posts. While still a teenager he became wealthy after Condé Nast Publications bought Reddit, the Web site he had helped build that lets users rank news and other electronic content.

Now his passion is a modern library. "I saw all these great books locked up in the stacks of libraries," Mr. Swartz said. "But nobody ever found out about them, because they didn't have a spot on the Web, and people weren't browsing the stacks anymore."

The new catalog project, Open Library, is set to go live in early March with records on 20 million books. The goal is to create a comprehensive Web page about any book ever published. Each page will include not just author, title, and publisher but also links that direct users to the nearest library with a copy and to related books. Other links will allow users to buy a book online or write a review of it.

The pages will be created or updated by anyone, in the style of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Some Web pages will also connect to the full text when its copyright has expired. Or users will be able to pay about 10 cents a page to have an unscanned out-of-copyright book at a college library digitized. The Open Library is backed by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, which gave the project $300,000 this year and will provide the full texts of materials in its own collection. (The Open Content Alliance, a book-digitization project, is another partner.)

Pushing Books on the Web

The project is similar to WorldCat, which is owned by OCLC, a nonprofit group that promotes technology in libraries. But it seeks to be bigger. While WorldCat has catalog records only from libraries — including about 10,000 academic libraries — that pay to be part of OCLC, the Open Library will include records from anywhere, free of charge. And while librarians maintain WorldCat, the public would maintain Open Library.

Mr. Swartz also wants to integrate his database with Wikipedia so that a citation of a book on the popular encyclopedia links to the book's page on Open Library. Another idea is to integrate Open Library with LibraryThing, a site that helps people catalog and share their own books. Eventually, Open Library may expand to include journal articles, too.

Should all those connections help increase Open Library's holdings close to the 72 million unique book records in WorldCat, Mr. Swartz's enterprise could upend the way libraries maintain records. Librarians could choose to bypass WorldCat and contribute catalog data to Open Library, jeopardizing OCLC's membership of more than 60,000 libraries and threatening a big chunk of its $235-million annual revenue.

It would be an amazing feat, especially since, at the moment, Open Library is struggling to get libraries to contribute. Librarians are not just uneasy having nonlibrarians edit catalogs; they are also afraid of offending OCLC. They rely on the organization as a broker for interlibrary loans and other crucial services. And libraries' contracts with OCLC prevent them from sharing their catalog information with for-profit institutions. That doesn't appear to be a problem for Open Library itself, because the group is nonprofit. But since there is nothing to stop Google or any other business from using Open Library's records for commercial gain, many librarians are holding back.

Striking a Deal with OCLC

Publicly, OCLC has stated that WorldCat and Open Library are complementary databases and should work together. "We have an interest in synchronizing WorldCat with digital libraries that are of interest to our member organizations, and Open Library is certainly one of those," said Chip Nilges, vice president for business development at OCLC. But one OCLC official, speaking on the condition that he not be identified, said Open Library was a waste of time and resources, and predicted it would fail.

Mr. Swartz plays down the competition between Open Library and World Cat, aware that highlighting the tension won't bring librarians to his project. A beta version of Open Library even provides links to WorldCat for users seeking to find a book at a local library. "We're not in opposition with OCLC," said Mr. Swartz. "It's just that because they've built this structure over time, dependent on a particular business model, it's much harder for them to move on to the Internet than it is for a new group like us."

Most of the Open Library records to date have come from the Library of Congress and various publishers. The University of North Carolina system has provided Open Library with 4.2 million records. Additional records have come from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Talis, a British library cooperative. Mr. Swartz said he was talking with a few other academic libraries, including the University of California's, about obtaining their records.

Jessamyn C. West, a librarian based in Bethel, Vt., who runs a popular blog, Librarian.net, wants Open Library to flourish. The small libraries she counsels can't afford subscriptions to WorldCat. As a result, their holdings are invisible to Vermonters searching online. She acknowledges, though, that contributing to Open Library would be difficult for many. "The library community is comfortable having a vendor," said Ms. West, "even if the vendor is not doing exactly what they want."