Books, artifacts, cataloging, networks

Hello.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Hello. I’m George Oates, Project Lead of the Open Library project, from the Internet Archive in
San Francisco. I come from the land of folksonomy and photographs, having worked at Flickr
from it’s inception to December 2008. I am new to the world of librarianship.

I’d like to talk brieﬂy about artifacts that books produce, the library as a social object, and
how those two ideas could enrich library cataloging.


The library world is not exactly a hotbed of innovation. Even though librarians are often
information architecture experts, and have a deep, abiding interest in classiﬁcation systems,
and making books accessible, I think that in the age of the web, this access is hindered by
the idea that records for books have been organized into a sequence, often sorted by title or
author name.

Many of the computing tools and formats are based on these physical card catalogs, where a
record is slotted into a sequence. Not to say that there aren’t a ton of librarians thinking hard
about to connect books to each other, but in terms of cataloging, it’s often a brutally
reductive process, in the past even literally constrained by the size of the index card the
record was written on.

I’ve been enjoying pressing on the challenge of transforming the library catalog into a
network.


It’s curious to me that the act of reading is most often solitary, but there’s an explosion of
social objects that spring from that. Quite apart from the content itself, books are covered in
markers and artifacts that tell us about their social lives.

Some rights reserved by pamhule


What are the artifacts that our interactions with books produce?
They produce meetings...
“Our Elberon Bookclub read, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." A number of the
members didn't like it, but that won't stop them from trying again next month!”

Some rights reserved by NJLA: New Jersey Library Association


Bibliographic points of interest

All rights reserved by jelens (used with permission)


The property mark of a convent in Barcelona.
All rights reserved by jelens, used with permission


http://www.forgottenbookmarks.com/2010/12/not-necessarily-in-that-order.html


“What book clubs are reading in Seattle”
Some rights reserved by brewbooks


A library is created through use.

Some rights reserved by Matt Hampel


This is Isaac Newton’s OWN COPY of his book, Opticks. It has Newton’s own handwriting and
annotations in the scan... SO COOL. It’s held at the Boston Public Library.


Handwritten scribbles and scrawls; annotations; corrections


Illuminated manuscripts - normally reserved for very special books, illuminated in gold. I like
to think of these book artifacts as a new sort of illumination.
No known copyright restrictions [?]

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/nationallibrarynz_commons/5344535652/


This is a book page on Google. You can see some computing power has been thrown at a
large body of text to extract common words, and passages that have been referenced
elsewhere.


This sort of processing is obviously useful for placing books into a network. Throwing
named-entity extractors at a body of text can give us people or place names, citations and
such.


I’m conﬂicted. It feels a bit clinical... I ﬁnd sentiment analysis sort of funny... I mean, why
don’t you just read the damn book already.

(Henry) Gray’s Anatomy, 1901
http://www.archive.org/stream/anatomydescripti00grayuoft


But then of course, you can do cool stuff like this :)

Some books are
only cursorily
to be tasted of.
THOMAS FULLER 1608-1661


http://www.archive.org/stream/bookloversenchir00irelrich#page/n6/mode/1up

Namely ﬁrst, voluminous books, the task of a man's life to read them over ; secondly,
auxiliary books, only to be repaired to on occasions ; thirdly, such as are mere pieces of
formality, so that if you look on them, you
look through them ; and he that peeps through the casement of the index, sees as much as if
he were in the house. But the laziness of those cannot be excused who perfunctorily pass
over authors of consequence, and only trade in their tables and contents. These, like city-
cheaters, having gotten the names of all country gentlemen, make silly people believe they
have long lived in those places where they never were, and ﬂourish with skill in those authors
they never seriously studied.

I see the irony of me using this quotation - but I have read that book, and it’s wonderful. A
series of love letters from authors to books.

The reason I bring this up now is that machine based treatments of literature are capable of
turning any book into one of these auxiliary books. Not to be consumed as a whole, but in
pieces.


Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer. A rewrite of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz,
that is poking at what’s possible with literature, and possible with paper. A reconstitution of
a previous story, with a beautiful, meaningful physical design.


Along the lines of physical books as social objects, this is Mr. Thatcher Wine, a former
Internet entrepreneur who now creates custom book collections and decorative “book
solutions,”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/garden/06books.html?scp=1&sq=book
%20designer&st=cse

Funny footnote: Correction: January 7, 2011
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of books Mr. Wine wrapped for the spa
in the condo tower Icon Brickell in Miami.


My mum volunteers every Tuesday at the Oxfam bookshop in Adelaide, South Australia. I
mentioned to her that I would be talking to you today, and she mentioned that a chap had
come into her bookstore asking to buy 2,000 books to furnish a new restaurant’s decor. (She
gave him the schlocky stuff that wasn’t moving.)
All rights reserved by Matilda Diamant


Old media is more generally a liability though, sadly.
Even though following along the patterns of deaccession -- which are rarely public, by the
way -- would be interesting, it’s a concern that lots of libraries are getting rid of physical
books where there’s a digital copy available. These seems dangerous - and actually, the
Internet Archive is quietly building a physical archive to catch this so called waste for the long
term.

No known copyright restrictions [?]


A library is created through use. As a reader, your library is like an autobiography. Tracking
changes over time, subject matter, who you lent things to and when maps back against your
life.

Some rights reserved by ninahale


Imagine if you could look back into the history of your personal library? Look at the shape of
the collection.
All rights reserved by jelens (used with permission)


I’m in love with informal fuzzy arrangements of books.

Library catalogs could be aware of many more things things like a book’s artifacts, its
circulation, how many people have read, borrowed or purchased the book, adjacent books,
general arrangements, changes over time. And from as many source collections as possible.

Catalog as Landscape?


How do you see the shape of a catalog? How can you see its boundaries and edges? How can
you move through it differently than search and retrieve?

Photo by me

Deconstruction

Some rights reserved by tuppus


I came to Open Library with a good deal of skepticism about the library world. Watching order
emerge from total chaos in the uncontrolled classiﬁcation system at work on Flickr, but, I was
intrigued to see if we could outline the catalog as a shape, so we pulled everything to bits to
see what we could ﬁnd.

LEADER: 01378cam 2200373I 4500
001 ocmocm01143845
003 OCoLC
005 19951211171151.0
008 750117r19531945nyu 000 1 eng u
019    $a4338553
040    $cSLC$dOCL$dTXA$dSFR$dOCoLC
049    $aSFRA
092    $aF$bSaLinger 1953
100 1 $aSalinger, J. D.$q(Jerome David),$d1919-
245 14 $aThe catcher in the rye.
260    $a[New York] :$bNew American Library,$c[1953, c1951]
300    $a192 p.$c18 cm.
490 0 $aSignet book,$vD1667
500    $aReprint of the 1945 ed. published by Little, Brown, Boston.
590    $aBarbara Grier and Donna McBride collection.
650 0 $aTeenage boys$vFiction.
650 0 $aBrothers and sisters$vFiction.
650 0 $aPreparatory schools$vFiction.
650 4 $aAlienation in teenagers$vFiction.
650 4 $aTeenage boys$xInterpersonal relations$vFiction.
650 4 $aEmotionally disturbed teenage boys$vFiction.
655 4 $aQueer pulps.
907    $a.b15331775$b10-24-07$c07-20-03
998    $axsf$b07-01-03$cm$da$e-$feng$gnyu$h4$i1
935    $aADM-9576
907    $a.b15331775$b02-23-04$c07-20-03
945    $aF SaLinger 1953$g1$i31223037153153$lxsfgl$o-$p$0.00$q-$rc$so
$t1$u0$v0$w0$x0$y.i25499191$z08-05-03


Here is a MARC record. Full of data!

Let’s see what happens when you explode Library of Congress Subject Headings. This data
isn’t even in Open Library - we borrowed it from loc.gov then pulled out the dynamite...

LEADER: 01378cam 2200373I 4500
001 ocmocm01143845
003 OCoLC
005 19951211171151.0
008 750117r19531945nyu 000 1 eng u
019    $a4338553
040    $cSLC$dOCL$dTXA$dSFR$dOCoLC
049    $aSFRA
092    $aF$bSaLinger 1953
100 1 $aSalinger, J. D.$q(Jerome David),$d1919-
245 14 $aThe catcher in the rye.
260    $a[New York] :$bNew American Library,$c[1953, c1951]
300    $a192 p.$c18 cm.
490 0 $aSignet book,$vD1667
500    $aReprint of the 1945 ed. published by Little, Brown, Boston.
655 4 $aQueer pulps.
907    $a.b15331775$b10-24-07$c07-20-03
935    $aADM-9576
907    $a.b15331775$b02-23-04$c07-20-03
945    $aF SaLinger 1953$g1$i31223037153153$lxsfgl$o-$p$0.00$q-$rc$so
$t1$u0$v0$w0$x0$y.i25499191$z08-05-03


650 ﬁeld - subjects



Zoom in

650 0 $aPreparatory schools vFiction.
650 0 $aAlienation in teenagers vFiction.
650 0 $aTeenage boys$xInterpersonal relations vFiction.
650 0 $aEmotionally disturbed teenage boys vFiction.


Strip out the MaRC gumpf

Teenage boys, Fiction, Brothers and sisters,
Preparatory schools, Alienation in teenagers,
Interpersonal relations, Emotionally disturbed
teenage boys


Remove dupes, make it a human readable list

Teenage boys, Fiction, Brothers and sisters,
Preparatory schools, Alienation in teenagers,
Interpersonal relations, Emotionally disturbed
teenage boys


Then put a page behind all of them...


Looking at the subject page, you can see the Works with the most editions in the top panel,
with a handy indicator to tell you if you can read an electronic version....

By Casey Cripe


Casey Cripe


http://www.literature-map.com/aimee+bender.html

“Gnod is my experiment in the field of artificial intelligence. Its a self-adapting system, living
on this server and 'talking' to everyone who comes along. Gnods intention is to learn about
the outer world and to learn 'understanding' its visitors. This enables gnod to share all its
wisdom with you in an intuitive and efficient way. You might call it a search-engine to find
things you don't know about.”


I wanted to end with some quick comments on social design in the context of a library. I sort
of love the idea of Sssh as a design theme.

Even though we’ve seen that there’s a ton of social artifacts and connections that emerge
from reading, and collections of books, I quite like the restriction of not leaping to 2.0 style
tools in the design of Open Library.

Some rights reserved by Enokson


http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/bartiﬁcial/5027921214


This is ImportBot. He gets new catalog records from the Library of Congress and puts them
into Open Library every Tuesday. We also import records from Amazon, and from the Internet
Archive. ImportBot looks for recently scanned books, and creates new records (or merges
them with existing ones) just a few minutes after the record is created on the Internet
Archive.


Just simple building blocks for interconnection at this stage. Simply writing identifiers from
other bookish systems out there on the web. One benefit of collecting these identifiers is that
it allows developers out there to investigate the open library in their own language, but using
their own IDs.


It’s exciting -- at least, to me -- to imagine a turblent library catalog. This shift from
sequence to network, and the injection of different collection information and book artifacts
is something easy for computers to process. The more connections, the better - because that
increases our chance of ﬁnding things again.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/rreis/4859722551/sizes/l/

The Library at Night
by Alberto Manguel


I was very pleased to discover the writings of a chap called Alberto Manguel. His thinking on
libraries has been deeply inﬂuential. If you’re interested at all in books, libraries, or reading,
read him.

George Oates
glo@archive.org | slideshare.net/george08 | @openlibrary


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