In an attempt to recreate the Great Library of Alexandria, Aaron Swartz, co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification, writer, and web developer, announced on Monday the launch of the Open Library Project, quite possibly his most ambitious project to date.

The goal of this project is to produce the world’s largest and greatest library on the Internet. It is intended to be fully open and a product of the people: allowing them to create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. The demo, source code, and mailing lists were all opened up in hopes of drawing interest from the public at large.

Utilizing their own database design, ThingDB (tdb), as well as the team’s independently created wiki software, Infogami, the Open Library project team hopes to expand its framework in order to build exciting site-specific features on top of it. It has already been connected to the Internet Archive’s book scanning project, so that one can read the full text of all the out-of-copyright books they’ve made available. They also hope to add a print-on-demand feature in order to print copies of the scanned books, as well as a scan-on-demand feature, so one could fund the scanning of that out-of-copyright book they’ve always wanted.

For more information on the project, or for a demo, click here.