I think a Wiki will be a great place for presenting a "public face" but we still need to hash out what we are trying to do and how the volunteers are (will be) organized. I think a mailing list will be best utilized for that purpose.
Karen (I think) mentioned some potential target groups to invite, but for me at least, at this point, I don't have an idea of a mission statement. Is this to be a prograqmmer's playground for manipulating a large amount of bibliographic data? Are we building a comprehensive catalog a la "Books in Print"? Are we trying to organize this data into logical chunks a la LOC Classifications? Are we aiming to be "The Source" for book reviews and sources? Are we now or in the future going to have to be self sustaining or is computer storage and bandwidth provided by Internet Archive? I saw the USGenWeb Project go from conception to more than 10,000 volunteers in less than six months only to be "acquired" by Ancestry because they were the only entity at the time to step forward and provide computing resources. I still have a problem fifteen years later with their saying they are committed to "free and open data" while at the same time being the front door to a massive commercial enterprise that dominates their market segment. The original "hosts" walked away with 19 million dollars with no accountability or recourse to the volunteers who built the Project. I have seen comments that OL is kind of orphaned at this point. Whether that is from a management standpoint of lost / imperiled funding I don't know, but we need to discuss these matters as a part of the foundation of what we want to build. For myself I have garnered considerable valuable insight into the universe of Civil War Books by mining the OL database. Of the 30,000 titles I identified virtually none have covers, book reviews, TOCs or indexes and while I am busy building that information for my site and personal use, I am hesitant to commit resources to updating the OL database not knowing if my efforts will be wasted six months down the line. John Rigdon www.researchonline.net _______________________________________________ Ol-tech mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
