Though I certainly am not one of the sponsors of the project, I am one of the volunteers and I would be rather offended if a program that called itself "Open Library" would in fact be closed to broadly published books, even if they are controversial. I think in a case like this you want to look at common sense: we want to share open knowledge about books, per http://openlibrary.org/help/faq#oclc , so any book published openly and that could reasonably be included in any type of library (public, university or adult if such a thing exists) should be included. Does that mean we include all adult books published? No, but, in general all books published with some degree of circulation should be here. This is my opinion, I think it would be very counterproductive to start not including books because of some sense of moral judgement on them. That simply isn't the role of the librarian.
I have seen similar discussions at Wikipedia and what it comes down to is: if you are going to keep a project free and open, then any form of censorship is against the grain of the mission, whereas reasonable exclusion of things which aren't important, or in Wikipedia terms notable, makes sense. Alex Stinson User:Sadads http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sadads On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 10:16 AM, Stuart Fanning < [email protected]> wrote: > A bit of guidance please. When book censorship lifted in the US in the > mid to late 1960's a large number of 'adult' books were published, many of > which have become collectable items. Are the owners/sponsors of The Open > Library happy for these titles to be added, or would prefer for them not to > be? > > Thanks, Stuart Fanning > > _______________________________________________ > Ol-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > [email protected] > >
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