I came back to WorldCat earlier this evening as I was browsing wikipedia’s info on the A Certain Magical Index light novels, which haven’t had a translation project yet. I peeped the premier and am hoping the adaptation will stimulate a translation project somewhere.
I’ve seen WC before but it still intrigues me. The organization began in 2001 I’m guessing so it is decently matured, but glancing around it is quite clean. I love it. The simple notion of synchronizing the world’s libraries so one may find almost any sort of information locally is quite stunning. If only I could find direction as such to aim melative.
Some of the interesting features include custom lists, reviews, and tagging. Sure it isn’t feature dense, but its clean, and more importantly they have indexed over 1 billion items. I’m going to think of a nice way to integrate WorldCat into melative, perhaps with the list feature. I’m not sure about reviews, but most definitely WorldCat.org will become a standard resource* for all media, just as wikipedia.org is.
The problem with hard reviews would be that WorldCat’s titles represent physical objects. Where melative, like wikipedia, represents the metaphysical residue of a title; a single title is not split into DVD volumes (ie).
Anyway, I hope the site may come of use to others in the blogosphere.
note: A “standard resource” is simple a site which indexed much of the same media form (eg MAL, AniDB, ANN, Manga Updates etc) These are used on melative as a placeholder to more complete information on a title.
