"Imagine a library that collected all the world’s information about all the world’s books and made it available for everyone to view and update. We’re building that library."

(via MetaFilter)

Jessamyn West blogged about the site on Librarian.net and suggests checking the "About the Librarianship" page which says:

"For the first time, we'll have an open, public, curated, universal catalog of all books. But this also presents an enormous challenge: we need to develop a schema for all that book information. Like the MARC format, we'll want our schema to contain all the important bibliographic information that librarians want to collect about books. But we'll also want to take advantage of all the things we've learned since MARC."