Internet Archive
Lends the books. A footnote’s ISBN becomes a copy you can borrow tonight.
openness? Public-domain scans free to read; in-copyright books lent, not copied.
OpenLibrary
Knows every edition of every book — and which ones are actually open.
openness? Open bibliographic data, downloadable in bulk.
OpenAlex
Finds the free, legal copy of the paper behind the citation.
openness? Catalog CC0. Only papers with an open copy are shown — each card names its licence; closed ones are counted, not carded.
arXiv
Keeps whole sciences open by construction — the preprint is the publication.
openness? Metadata CC0; each paper names its own licence.
The Met
Shares its own record of its own objects, public domain wherever it can be.
openness? Public-domain works released CC0, images included.
Art Institute of Chicago
The painting’s home, telling you about the painting.
openness? Public-domain images CC0, served over open IIIF.
IIIF collections
One protocol, many doors: manuscripts and artworks served by whichever institution holds them.
openness? Terms set per object by its holding institution, stated in each manifest.
DPLA
America’s union catalog — tens of millions of items from local libraries, archives and museums.
openness? Metadata CC0; each item’s rights stated by its holder.
Europeana
Europe’s answer: three thousand museums, libraries and archives behind one door.
openness? Only openly licensed items are shown; each card names its licence.
iNaturalist
A community’s living field guide — photographs with the observer’s name on them.
openness? Each photo carries its observer’s chosen licence; only openly licensed ones are shown here.
GBIF
Draws where a species has been seen, from hundreds of millions of records.
openness? Records CC0 or CC BY, stated per dataset.
OpenStreetMap
Maps the world down to the building — by hand, by volunteers.
openness? Map data ODbL: share-alike, credit the contributors.
Free Law Project
Publishes the law itself. The opinion, not a paywall.
openness? Court opinions are public domain: nobody owns the law.
Wikimedia Commons
Brings the photographs, freely licensed, of very nearly everything.
openness? Every file free-licensed or public domain, credit shown on the file.
Wikidata & Wikipedia
The hosts: one writes the article that convenes everyone; the other makes the introductions — it knows every friend’s name for every thing.
openness? Article text CC BY-SA 4.0; Wikidata CC0.
How it works
The goal of this experiment is to demonstrate that open knowledge is not just hugely successful, but also increasingly hugely interlinked. So when you load an article, a small script on our server pulls existing linking information (from citations and Wikidata) and then grabs context from those sources to enrich the article — in one of two ways, and each card says which.
Identifier
The article states an ISBN, DOI, OCLC, LCCN, PMID or arXiv id, and a collection answers to exactly it. The strongest claim a card can make.
Statement
Wikidata states the connection outright — this painting is Met object 11417, this species is iNaturalist taxon 48662, this place is here. The card credits the property.
Each shelf says who asked, too: when one friend answers several of the article’s links, its cards split into one labelled shelf per link — and in the opening section, works by the subject never share a shelf with works merely cited there.
Challenges and future opportunities
This is a demo and not intended for production. Among other challenges:
Page layout
Arbitrary content means great layout is somewhere between difficult and impossible. Work with designers on this challenge would be necessary (though even rudimentary implementations would likely be very enjoyable for certain types of data nerds!)
Content curation
Sources can return thousands of responses. (Think the Smithsonian on the Apollo Program, for example.) A gallery with a thousand items is not very helpful to the reader, so some sort of curation (or at least ability to tune algorithmic prioritization) would be necessary before widespread deployment.
Source curation
Similarly, there are many collections of open content these days. Picking and prioritizing them would be an important challenge if we wanted to expand this.
Metadata gaps
The recent scan of thousands of theses from historical figures will be nice sources of context, but very little of it has metadata yet. Ideally the fix is to deploy Wikipedian energy to other repositories to improve the metadata, not have it curated only inside Wikipedia.
Bot volume and caching
Because of the volume of Wikipedia, to be deployable at any sort of scale, this would likely need extensive caching and likely formal agreements with the other data providers.