An Open library is being proposed on the web that would have information about all the world's books. This Wikipedia like website site would be a public resource that anyone in any country can access and search it.

This library would not only be simply "free to the people," but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to the planet's cultural legacy. The Open library would be very comprehensive.

It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would provide links to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded.

The Open Library would even collect reviews, references, discussions and every other relevant data about the book  which has been catalogued. When the full text of a work is available, it would be downloadable in a variety of formats, including PDF, DjVu, XML and full text.

All of these formats will be readily accessible from every book page in the wiki, and repurposed in the book viewer UI, currently under development.

Aaron Swartz is leading a small and dedicated team to build the Open Library. Swartz has worked on specs like RSS, startups like Reddit.com, His team includes Anand Chitipothu,  a programmer, who has a master's degree in Computational Science from the Indian Institute of Science. He is working full-time for the Open Library from India.

The team has developed a brand new database infrastructure for handling millions of dynamic records. The team also has evolved a new type of wiki that lets users enter structured data, set up a search engine to look through it all. They have hooked it up to the Internet archive's book scanning project, so that the full text of all the out-of-copyright books can be made available.

The software powering Open Library is centered around a flexible templating system that enables anyone to have control over the organisation of their information display. It is designed to be simple to use, to encourage participation, yet powerfully modular through the application of macros and principles of networked interface.

Open Library will have a graduated accounts system in which users automatically get an account by taking an action on the site, without having to explicitly register. In addition to lots of traffic from Google, it will have a powerful search engine with faceting.

It will support tags and user-defined collections, and enable many different types of users who love books to communicate, share knowledge and work effectively together. It will have an advanced book viewer that will handle OCRed text with distributed proofreading as well as transclusion and bookmarks. Books will also be available as print on demand. Anyone can edit the catalog or review or rate or comment on a book.

Out-of-copyright books can be uploaded or, through a donation to Open Library. A document is being prepared to review existing technologies, explain concepts, present a framework for discussion and outline a plan to meet those goals for a full site launch in October. To discuss this document, you may join the General Discussion mailing list at

http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss. Informal groups are also created to establish the equivalent of watch lists of other users contributions to Open Library. 

 Aaron Swartz and the Open Library team fervently hope that this project is for real — not simply another pie-in-the-sky idea — but they need your help to make it a reality. They have opened up the demo built (http://demo.openlibrary.org) so far, opening up the source code, opening up the mailing lists, and hope many would join in this movement to build the Open Library. Anyone can help build Open Library.

A user doesn't have to have advanced technical knowledge in computer or informational sciences to help — all anyone needs to begin contributing is a knowledge of books. One could also help making phone calls to various data providers to get their data and passing it on to the Open Library. Another way would be to urge libraries to send a dump of their data to the Open Library. So, get cracking to help make The Open Library, real!