[HN Gopher] Internet Archive announces new Open Library Explorer...
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Internet Archive announces new Open Library Explorer (beta)
Author : mekarpeles
Score : 110 points
Date : 2020-12-21 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.openlibrary.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.openlibrary.org)
| musicale wrote:
| It never ceases to amaze and dismay me how we've built the
| greatest library in human history, one with intrinsic properties
| of unlimited readers per book, negligible distribution cost, and
| minimal barriers to access, and then done our best to sabotage
| those properties.
|
| Since the typically imposed access barriers are based on
| copyright law, the situation could be improved somewhat by:
|
| a) reforming copyright law to allow orphan works to enter the
| public domain, and
|
| b) enabling authors to (easily) add creative commons licenses
| (minimally something like CC BY-NC-ND) permitting unlimited
| readers in digital libraries.
| jabo wrote:
| Great work @mekarpeles and team!
|
| I'm working on an open source alternative to Algolia called
| Typesense (https://github.com/typesense/typesense) and just this
| last weekend I built an Instant Search experience using the 28M
| Open Library books data set and Typesense:
|
| https://books-search.typesense.org/
| superkuh wrote:
| I am impressed and happy to see Open Library works without
| Javascript. Thanks for considering the dozens of us. It's totally
| reasonable not to have "Explorer" work since it sounds like an
| application and not a document. And even in that case the links
| and search still show up so it falls back well.
| edlinfan wrote:
| This is a wonderful tool and goes a long way to scratch the
| "library itch" I've felt since the start of the pandemic.
| Projects like this make me very happy that I donated to IA this
| year, and I'd encourage anyone else who likes them to do the
| same.
|
| One question: are there any plans to sort fiction by author,
| similar to what is done in real libraries? A lot of fiction is
| already available in this tool, filed under DDN 8xx, but the
| groupings are pretty broad.
| mekarpeles wrote:
| This is a great idea. One of the reasons Open Library Explorer
| is possible is we have a healthy amount of Dewey + Library of
| Congress classification data for our books. As you notes, Dewey
| has Literature 8xx. Library Explorer also supports Library of
| Congress (you can go to the settings cog and change the
| classification system).
|
| Some classifications (LCCN) are better at encodind Author data
| and we also have a significant amount of author data in Open
| Library (we'd just need to integrate it more meaningfully in
| our search index).
|
| I opened an issue for you here:
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/4319
|
| Given our small team size, not sure we'll have the bandwidth to
| prioritize any time soon, but contributions are also welcome
| from the community and we (the community) meet every Tuesday @
| 11:30am to discuss and unblock together.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| The article tries in several paragraphs to explain the experience
| of using it - I'd recommend instead just clicking on the Library
| Explorer link[1] yourself and actually experiencing it yourself.
|
| There's something to be said for these physical-world-analogue
| UIs, in my opinion. Even if this is technically the same
| affordance as provided by old school web directory UIs, there's
| more of a sense of tangibility and immediacy to this kind of
| visual presentation, that makes it more appealing and easier to
| spend longer times in.
|
| [1] https://openlibrary.org/explore
| mekarpeles wrote:
| Updated the article to include a shiny "try it here" link at
| the top based on your feedback, thank you.
| mrspeaker wrote:
| One bit of "meta" feedback from me: I love Open Library, but
| I get stuck every time I read one of the blog posts - because
| there's no link to the actual library! I always hunt for it
| for a while and eventually have to go up to the url and
| manually remove "blog." and the rest of the blog page
| parameters.
|
| Maybe I'm just missing it? But the big "Open Library" icon is
| not clickable, and even the "about" page doesn't seem to have
| a link to openlibrary.org.
| mekarpeles wrote:
| https://openlibrary.org/explore
|
| Do try out the "Settings" cog at the bottom of the UI -- one
| thing that makes this interface so powerful is you can add custom
| queries to transform the entire library (such as to only show
| kids books, text books, or biographies on any subject).
| cratermoon wrote:
| As cool as this is, I think it would be worth your while to look
| up Clay Shirky's "Ontology is overrated" if you can find it, or
| watch his talk https://youtu.be/ujMgQqp8YSY?t=1118
| cdrini wrote:
| Thank you for trying the Library Explorer :) Very interesting
| talk! Personally, I don't think anything there is a testament
| for abandoning classification trees entirely; just "common
| pitfalls" to avoid when building new ones. The Library Explorer
| is very purposefully classification-system agnostic, so if a
| better classification system comes along, we can import it and
| switch to it! And unlike a physical library, we don't have any
| re-shelving costs :)
|
| One of the core design features I was aiming for with Library
| Explorer was that the user should never be navigating the
| "hierarchy;" they should be navigating the books. Forcing the
| user to move through categories forces them to try to
| understand the hierarchy, which can at times be not super user-
| friendly. Note that the Yahoo/Google examples in the video do
| just that; the user picks a class, and then sees websites. By
| showing them the books directly, the user "deduces" the
| classification tree (lots of books about physics? I must be in
| the physics section); the classification labels aren't really
| necessary for exploration.
|
| In general, I think there are trade-offs. A classification tree
| is a model with flaws (just like all models). But its core
| benefits are (1) it's a tree; so each node has semantic
| siblings, parents, and children; (2) each node in the tree has
| a finite number of child nodes (and usually <30 child nodes;
| which makes it ideal for human traversal); (3) each book can be
| uniquely identified by the path from the root. (3) Was very
| important for physical librarians (classification systems were
| sort of like a search index for librarians), and was the cause
| of some of the issues described by Shirky. But online, we don't
| need (3), so we can kind of throw it away. The tree can be
| degenerate; books can (and do!) appear in multiple nodes of the
| classification tree, because, unlike in a physical collection,
| in a digital collection, books are disjointed from the
| classification tree itself.
|
| Tag-clouds are _definitely_ more flexible (as Shirky said,
| classification trees are a _restriction_ on the tag-cloud
| model), but come at a cost of being harder to navigate (as
| flexibility usually does) and get a "big picture" idea of. I
| haven't seen a good example of a UI that lets you navigate tags
| in a way that doesn't just let you travel from one node to a
| neighbouring node (please post if folks have one!). Trees allow
| you to travel up (parent node), down (child node), and
| left/right (sibling nodes). Graphs you're limited to just
| traveling to adjacent nodes. You could try to algorithmically
| _deduce_ parent/child relationships though (that would be an
| interesting thing to try! I'm sure algorithms exist that do
| this). Ways of browsing graphs is definitely an interesting
| problem space! Open Library does also have tags (called
| "Subjects"), so finding a way to make them more user-browsing
| friendly would be great :)
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Does openlibrary.org support Z39.50 access?
|
| The way the openlibrary.org site is constructed seems better than
| the others that came before, e.g., WorldCat. Every page is not
| just HTML but JSON, too. Omit the slug and add .json after the
| ID.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25498127
|
| This is without even considering the availability of bulk data
| dumps. A+
| mekarpeles wrote:
| Hi thanks kindly for the question, we don't currently have
| Z39.50 or OAI-PMH access, however we do surface content via
| OPDS:
|
| https://ianews.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/open-library-opds @
| https://bookserver.archive.org.
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