# What28099s happening with OpenLibrary and OCA


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I have previously written about the
[OpenLibrary](http://openlibrary.org), both [how much I liked their
interface](http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/04/02/google-books-step-aside-openlibrary-makes-reading-fun/),
and [how it frustrated me that they didn’t communicate better to the
public about their
progress](http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/08/03/openlibrary-and-universal-library-guys-work-together/).
Recently, a[workshop was held in San
Francisco](http://www.opencontentalliance.org/?p=128), *“to share
progress and plans for continued growth of open web access to digital
books”*. Two of the outcomes reported were initiatives to provde
[print-on-demand](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_on_demand "Print on demand")
for some of the [public
domain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain "Public domain")
books (through [Hewlett
Packard](http://www.hp.com/ "Hewlett-Packard Company")) and
scan-on-demand for books at [Boston Public
Library](http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.3491166667,-71.0787361111&spn=0.01,0.01&q=42.3491166667,-71.0787361111%20%28Boston%20Public%20Library%29&t=h "Boston Public Library")
(and perhaps more to come).

Very little was reported on how the general growth of the collection was
proceeding, but when I visited their website again, I was surprised to
see that the number of full text books had increased from what I
remember to be around 400,000 books, to 1,064,822! That is a huge
increase, and what is unclear, since there is no information about this
anywhere, is whether they suddenly imported a huge amount of books that
had been lying around waiting for processing, or whether they have been
continually adding books, without updating this number. I guess the
future will show if this number will change on a daily basis or not.

While this is great, there seem to be some quality issues. First of all,
many of the books I searched would not display the full text - when
clicking on the link, nothing came up. Worse than that however, is that
some scans seem to be very bad, to the point of useless. An egregious
example that shows several weird artefacts is here: [Dansk biografisk
lexikon](http://openlibrary.org/details/danskbiografisk00bricgoog). This
book - which was the second or third link that I clicked on, I did not
go hunting for this example - is really strange. If you begin reading
through it, the first you see is a Copyright page for [Google
Books](http://books.google.com/ "Google Book Search")! Weird, I did not
know that
[OCA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Content_Alliance "Open Content Alliance")
included material from Google Books. The next few pages have pictures of
a hand wearing a glove - this book scanner has been immortalized. And
finally, once you start reading, there is what seems to be a curious mix
of two different scans - one seems like it’s a Google Books scan, with
the bright white background, and other an OCA scan with the yellowish
background.

Interestingly, when you go to the [Internet Archive detail
page](http://www.archive.org/details/danskbiografisk00bricgoog) (which
is of course separate from the [OpenLibrary archive
page](http://openlibrary.org/b/OL6968915M)), you find this information:
Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user
tpb.

Color me confused. I think this effort to make books available online is
wonderful, but I fail to understand why they are not more participatory
about it. On the OpenLibrary website, I cannot even flag a scan as
faulty. And it is much harder for me to promote OpenLibrary when I speak
about open access and open education, because I know so little about it.
This seems to me to be shooting oneself in the foot.

(And we still really need to be able to scan in on pages in the flipbook
view. The interface is great, but hasn’t been updated for a long time).

Stian

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