Earlier this year we released our Open Libraries wish list, which brought together four datasets to help inform our collection development priorities for Open Libraries. After working with the wish list for a few months and reviewing our approach, we decided to make a few revisions to the ways in which we brought together the data. Our wish list was always intended to be an iterative work-in-progress, and we are pleased to release our latest version here:
To create the wish list, we brought together four datasets:
OCLC’s list of one million most widely whatsapp lead held books, based on holdings records of libraries worldwide;
Library Link’s holdings records of North American libraries, leveraging the decisions of thousands of librarians in prioritizing collections for patron use;
Open Syllabus Project, which has collected syllabi from the Internet to compile the most assigned books in classrooms;
Data about book and scholarly article citations in Wikipedia, published by the Wikimedia Foundation.
These data help us define a collection of 1.5M books, identified by their ISBNs, that are widely held and frequently cited. We continue to work on human-mediated efforts to identify collections that are reflective of the diverse voices in our communities.