Remind Me

A small group from the Internet Archive has started a (for me, anyway) drool-worthy undertaking- the Open Library Project:

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.

I've been looking for something like this for a long time, and it looks like they're doing it right.

The idea is to collect data about every book, ever. The best way, they figure, is to wikify it. Not only are they opening the project up as a wiki, they are opening the project up. Period:

We located a copy of the Library of Congress card catalog, phoned publishers and asked them for their data, created a brand new database infrastructure for handling millions of dynamic records, wrote a new type of wiki that lets users enter structured data, set up a search engine to look through it all, and made the resulting site look good.

We hooked it up to the Internet Archive's book scanning project, so that you can read the full text of all the out-of-copyright books they've made available. And we hope to add a print-on-demand feature, so that you can get nice paper copies of these scanned books, as well as a scan-on-demand feature, so you can fund the scanning of that out-of-copyright book you've always loved.

They've opened up the whole project as a beta and are calling on anyone who might be interested to get involved not just with the knowledge-base wiki end of things, but with shaping the project itself.

Go give it a whirl... if you've read this far, I know you want to.