A Community-Curated Nancy Drew Collection
Open Library volunteers successfully launched a comprehensive Nancy Drew collection, highlighting the intricacies of metadata management and community collaboration. This effort demonstrates how distributed teams can tackle significant data organization challenges, providing a practical case study for online community projects. The story resonates on HN for its display of problem-solving, open-source spirit, and the dedication required for large-scale digital curation.
The Lowdown
A dedicated team of Open Library volunteers has meticulously created and launched an extensive Nancy Drew book collection, making the beloved series more accessible to the public. This project, initiated by volunteer Emily, involved a global team working collaboratively to overcome significant metadata challenges inherent in organizing a vast, multi-series literary work.
- Project Inception: The collection began when Emily proposed the idea on Open Library's librarian Slack channel, garnering interest from international volunteers.
- Collaborative Approach: The team utilized detailed Google Docs for asynchronous planning and a crucial initial Zoom call to foster human connection and align on objectives.
- Technical & Methodological Challenges: Volunteers explored various methods for building the collection, including Python scripting, but ultimately opted for manual tagging of subject fields with a
collectionid:due to complexity, technical expertise limitations, and performance concerns for users. - Metadata Deep Dive: A major undertaking involved extensive metadata cleanup, addressing issues such as incorrect ghostwriter attributions for the Carolyn Keene pseudonym and verifying facts across multiple editions.
- Volunteer Motivation & Learning: Contributors were driven by nostalgia, a desire to gain library and metadata editing skills, and the opportunity to engage in book-related work remotely.
- Key Learnings: The project provided valuable insights into collection building, emphasizing the importance of human connection in collaborative efforts and the potential benefits of live training for metadata editing.
- Future Scope: Work is ongoing, with aspirations to add more series tags, featured collections, and to implement a solution for ordering books chronologically within series.
The project underscores the power of community-driven initiatives in digital librarianship, transforming a complex archival task into a rich, publicly available resource through collective effort and meticulous attention to detail.