Open Library, a favorite project of mine, got some ink this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article will be available at this link for the next week before it's lost forever to read-at-the-library or pay-for-access status only, so read it online while you can. The piece puts some emphasis on the "rivalry" between the Open Library and OCLC (AKA: The Devil), to which some folks on the project listserve object, but I say rightfully so. While it is true that both tools can be useful, ultimately the two projects are philosophically different in my opinion. WorldCat is unneccessarily expensive and hard to use (beyond casual searching). But Open Library, and eventually the Zotero Commons, promises a new model of information discovery.

I've said this before, but the problem is that most librarians have been trained to think of optimizing access to resources by classifying them--putting them into categories. All you need to know is the right category, and you can find anything. But when historians (for example) are doing their best, most creative work, they break sources out of their typical categories and use them in fresh, new ways. Thus, ideally, information should not be put into smaller more specific categories, but it should be freed from the categories that entangle it.

In the old days, categories were neccessary because a book could only be in one place at a time, so you had to make a judgement about which shelf it would sit on. WorldCat is good for that. But in the digital age, where records can be served dynamically with minimal additional infrastructure, it's time to abandon the constraints of the shelf. Open Library will take us closer to that goal.

I just hope Open Library does not become a mere "market adjustment" like Intel is trying to make out of the XO.