Colorado Library Consortium Adds Project Gutenberg Ebooks to Library Catalogs

The Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC), in collaboration with Douglas County Libraries (DCL) and other Colorado libraries, launched a new program, "E-discover the Classics," to help Colorado libraries easily provide users access to content from Project Gutenberg—a site that provides free ebooks and audiobooks of public domain works. The project has expanded to help libraries in other states, and other countries, do the same.

The original idea was simple: provide complete MARC records for Project Gutenberg content (with direct links to the downloadable ebooks and audiobooks) that libraries could easily put into their own catalogs using a MARC loader. It turned out to be a complicated project—but one that could end up benefiting libraries worldwide.

Holiday project
Valerie Horton, executive director of the Colorado Library Consortium, told LJ that the concept came from Jamie LaRue, director of DCL, who felt that ereaders would be a popular gift during the holiday season, and that Colorado libraries should do all they can to provide more content for those devices.

Soon Horton and LaRue spearheaded a project to obtain MARC records for the most popular Project Gutenberg titles, add links to them if needed, and provide them to libraries as an easy way to expand their ebook catalogs at little to no cost.

(While OverDrive offers libraries an option, first launched in August, to provide Project Gutenberg ebook downloads, it differs from the Colorado project in that the downloads are made available on a separate OverDrive site, as part of its paid service, and with no integration into libraries' regular catalogs.)

MARC repair
The set of MARC records that CLiC staff first accessed from the Project Gutenberg site—originally provided by an Australian project called Beyond Books, Beyond Barriers—needed a lot of cleaning up.

Indeed, according to Horton, the original MARC records were "completely unusable." Most did not use Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and name-authority control—the use of consistent names for authors from record to record—was "abysmal," said Horton.

CLiC sent the MARC records for the most popular downloads from Project Gutenberg (as of November 30) to San Antonio, TX-based bibliographic services company Marcive for an initial cleanup, and followed it with further tweaks by staffers at CLiC, DCL, and the University of Denver's Penrose Library. (CLiC provides more technical details about the enhancements on its website [PDF].) The resulting 466 MARC records were then made available on the CLiC site in early December, freely available to all. Meanwhile, staffers have continued to refine and improve the MARC records, with the latest improvements added on December 21.

CLiC and DCL created websites to make Colorado librarians aware of the cleaned-up records, and to provide assistance in getting the ebooks onto ereaders. The records were immediately popular, and after about 80 academic and public libraries in Colorado contacted CLiC about the project, Horton decided to get the word out to other states and countries via consortial listservs. Horton has since been contacted by librarians from all over the United States and from other countries, including South Africa, Israel, and Sweden.