Today I’m introducing new pages for people and other authors on The Online Books Page. The new pages combine and augment information that’s been on author listings and subject pages. They let readers see in one place books both about and by particular people. They also let readers quickly see who the authors are and learn more about them. And they encourage readers to explore to find related authors and books online and in their local libraries. They draw on information resources created by librarians, Wikipedians, and other people online who care about spreading knowledge freely. I plan to improve on them over time, but I think they’re developed enough now to be useful to readers. Below I’ll briefly explain my intentions for these pages, and I hope to hear from you if you find them useful, or have suggestions for improvement.

Who is this person?

Readers often want to know more about the people who created the books they’re interested in. If they like an author, they might want to learn more about them and their works– for instance, finding out what Mark Twain did besides creating Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. For less familiar authors, it helps to know what background, expertise, and perspectives the author has to write about a particular subject. For instance, Irving Fisher, a famous economist in the early 20th century, wrote about various subjects, not just ones dealing with economics, but also with health and public policy. One might treat his writings on these various topics in different ways if one knows what areas he was trained in and in what areas he was an interested amateur. (And one might also reassess his predictive abilities even in economics after learning from his biography that he’d famously failed to anticipate the 1929 stock market crash just before it happened.)

The Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons communities have created many articles, and uploaded many images, of the authors mentioned in the Online Books collection, and they make them freely reusable. We’re happy to include their content on our pages, with attribution, when it helps readers better understand the people whose works they’re reading. Wikipedia is of course not the last word on any person, but it’s often a useful starting point, and many of its articles include links to more authoritative and in-depth sources. We also link to other useful free references in many cases. For example, our page on W. E. B. Du Bois includes links to articles on Du Bois from the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, BlackPast, and the Archives and Records center at the University of Pennsylvania, each of which describes him from a different perspective. Our goal in including these links on the page is not to exhaustively present all the information we can about an author, but to give readers enough context and links to understand who they are reading, and to encourage them to find out more.

Find more books and authors

Part of encouraging readers to find out more is to give them ways of exploring books and authors beyond the ones they initially find. Our page on Rachel Carson, for example, includes a number of works she co-wrote as an employee of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as a public domain booklet on her prepared by the US Department of State. But it doesn’t include her most famous works like Silent Spring and the Sea Around Us, which are still under copyright without authorized free online editions, as are many recent biographies and studies of Carson. But you can find many of these books in libraries near you. Links we have on the left of her page will search library catalogs for works about her, and links on the bottom right will search them for work by her, via our Forward to Libraries service.

Readers might also be interested in Carson’s colleagues. The “Associated authors” links on the left side of Carson’s page go to other pages about people that Carson collaborated with who are also represented in our collection, like Bob Hines and Shirley Briggs. Under the “Example of” heading, you can also follow links to other biologists and naturalists, doing similar work to Carson.

Metadata created with care by people, processed with care by code

I didn’t create, and couldn’t have created (let alone maintained) all of the links you see on these pages. They’re the work of many other people. Besides the people who wrote the linked books, collaborated on the linked reference articles, and created the catalog and authority metadata records for the books, there are lots of folks who created the linked data technology and data that I use to automatically pull together these resources on The Online Books Page. I owe a lot to the community that has created and populated Wikidata, which much of what you see on these pages depends on, and to the LD4 library linked data community, which has researched, developed, and discussed much of the technology used. (Some community members have themselves produced services and demonstrations similar to the ones I’ve put on Online Books.) Other crucial parts of my services’ data infrastructure come from the Library of Congress Linked Data Service and the people that create the records that go into that. The international VIAF collaboration has also been both a foundation and inspiration for some of this work.

These days, you might expect a new service like this to use or tout artificial intelligence somehow. I’m happy to say that the service does not use any generative AI to produce what readers see, either directly, or (as far as I’m aware) indirectly. There’s quite a bit of automation and coding behind the scenes, to be sure, but it’s all built by humans, using data produced in the main by humans, who I try to credit and cite appropriately. We don’t include statistically plausible generated text that hasn’t actually been checked for truth, or that appropriates other people’s work without permission or credit. We don’t have to worry about unknown and possibly unprecedented levels of power and water consumption to power our pages, or depend on crawlers for AI training so aggressive that they’re knocking library and other cultural sites offline. (I haven’t yet had to resort to the sorts of measures that some other libraries have taken to defend themselves against aggressive crawling, but I’ve noticed the new breed of crawlers seriously degrading my site’s performance, to the point of making it temporarily unusable, on more than one occasion.) With this and my other services, I aim to develop and use code that serves people (rather than selfishly or unthinkingly exploiting them), and that centers human readers and authors.

Work in progress

I hope readers find the new “people” pages on The Online Books Page useful in discovering and finding out more about books and authors of interest to them. I’ve thought of a number of ways we can potentially extend and build on what we’re providing with these new pages, and you’ll likely see some of them in future revisions of the service. I’ll be rolling the new pages out gradually, and plan to take some time to consider what features improve readers’ experience, and don’t excessively get in their way. The older-style “books by” and “books about” people pages will also continue to be available on the site for a while, though these new integrated views of people may eventually replace them.

If you enjoy the new pages, or have thoughts on how they could be improved, I’d enjoy hearing from you! And as always, I’m also interested in your suggestions for more books and serials — and people! — we can add to the Online Books collection.