The Open Library Launches Community Reviews

From The Open Library Blog:

You can now publicly review books using structured book #tags on Open Library with Community Reviews. Take a look, try it out, and send us feedback!

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How can Open Library empower readers to share their impressions abobooks in a new way, facilitate useful reviews which are structured and easily digestible, while maintaining a safe and neutral library landscape?

Open Library’s collaborative approach, which we’re calling Community Reviews, borrows from an old (now defunct) project called BookLamp and a more recent project called StoryGraph, which let participants use tags to vote on & review various aspects of books like pace, genre, mood, and more.

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The more participants who vote using review tags, the more accurate and meaningful the review becomes for the community. Instead of sifting through dozens of text reviews, Community Reviews gives readers a birds-eye view across many publicly listed dimensions they might care about like Pace, Enjoyability, Clarity, Difficulty, Breadth, Genre, Mood, Impressions, Length, Credibility, Text Features, Content Warnings, Terminology, and Purpose.

Here’s what Open Library Community Reviews looks like:

[Clip] Community Reviews is a beta work in progress and we expect it to change drastically over the coming weeks based on feedback from our community. We also anticipate issues and bugs may emerge — you can help by reporting bugs and issues here.We do have every intention for Community Reviews to be included (in an anonymized form) in our public monthly data dumps for the benefit of our community and via our APIs, though this may take some time to implement.

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