http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/08/08/mclemee
We’re taking it step by step. Our first goal is to get catalog information for every book — a big project in itself. We’ve been calling all the publishers and national libraries and research libraries to get copies of their catalogs (we’d love readers’ help with this, by the way!) and then we’re working on algorithms
to integrate all that data into one coherent site.
After that, we want to work on improving the book-reading interface for books that we have scans of. We’re hoping to make the scanned text into a wiki as well, so that people can fix typos and correct errors in our processing (OCR) of the scan. We’d also like to think about new ways that people can work with a book’s full text online and what the proper interface for that should be. And, of course, we want to think about ways we can get more books scanned. One idea is a “Scan this book” button on every out-of-copyright book, where for $50 to $100, we’ll page the book from a library, deliver it to the scanners, and then email you a PDF of the book and put the full text online, with a little nameplate thanking you for funding it.
And then, of course, we want to expand beyond just books. We’re eager to do the same thing with journal articles: one open site where we list every journal article, all the journal articles by a particular author, sorts by subject and topic, the abstracts and references, and links to places where you can find a full text copy. I just got back from a science conference and the folks I talked to there loved the idea. And after that there’s music and movies, naturally.
