Open Library Blog

There is some really lovely stuff happening around the internet about books at the moment. Here’s just one thing I stumbled on that’s absolutely gorgeous.

One Book, Many Readings by Christian Swinehart

It’s a series of visualizations and commentary on what it means to move through a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and what sort of book you end up with if you just construct various scaffolding around places and events instead of providing a directed beginning-to-end narrative.

This paragraph stuck out at me:

Just as looking at a film only in terms of its individual frames would be missing the point, considering the pages of a CYOA book in isolation ignores what makes the structure of these books special. As in all hypertext systems, pages make up the body of the organism, but it is the nervous system of connections between them that allows for emergent properties to develop.

It’s precisely that “nervous system” that we’ve been thinking about behind the scenes at Open Library. Admittedly, the catalog we have right now is pretty dry. Many of our records are all but empty and certainly don’t tell visitors much about the actual books they catalog. We’ve been trying to eke out the landscape of the catalog, because there’s certainly lots of data in it. I mean, in lieu of rich individual records, what can the aggregate tell us? Can we build pages around these aggregate views? What could we show on, say, a page that shows all the books we have about cheese? How would Open Library operate if there was no search box? Would it be navigable?

Many questions, as you can see. I wonder if we can make a Choose Your Own Catalog.

You may have to be of a certain age to appreciate this, but… here we go.

Or, not so wild actually, it’s the Library of Congress!

We were thrilled to see our BookReader on the read.gov site today. The Library is using it to showcase of some gorgeous books from their Rare Book Collection, like “A Wonder-Book for Girls & Boys,” “The Baby’s Own Aesop,” and “A Christmas Carol.”

You might also be interested to follow along with a “book in progress” called The Exquisite Corpse Adventure, “an episodic progressive story game” with more than 20 contributors.

There’s information about the BookReader software on the Open Library site if you’re code-y too. We love it when the BookReader gets used!

We’re planning for a scheduled downtime on Wednesday, October 28 for hardware upgrade of Open Library servers. Open Library will be unavailable for 2 hours during 7:00 AM PST - 9:00 AM PST.

We’ll post here when the site’s back online.

Update at 8:36am: And we’re back!

I was listening to the radio over my morning coffee this morning when I heard that today is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s birthday. I thought I’d have a peek and see if Open Library holds references to any of his writings. Turns out we do.

From Third Class in Indian Railways, one of a short series of essays including The Moral Basis of Co-operation, published in 1917:

The compartment itself was evil looking. Dirt was lying thick upon the wood work and I do not know that it had ever seen soap or water. (From Page 5)

Or from A Guide To Health, published in 1921.

Exercise is as much of vital necessity for man as air, water and food, in the sense that no man who does not take exercise regularly, can be perfectly healthy. By “exercise” we do not mean merely walking, or games like hockey, football or cricket; we include under the term all physical and mental activity. Exercise, even as food, is as essential to the mind as to the body. The mind is much weakened by want of exercise as the body, and a feeble mind is, indeed, a form of disease. (Page 59.)

We have many more titles by him, including translations and other works such as Indian Home Rule, The Pilgrim’s March & Freedom’s Battle. (Just look for the “View” link to read the texts, scanned by the Internet Archive.)

Happy Birthday to this great man in human history. And in general, I wonder how we might begin to deliver “timely history” for visitors to Open Library. What timely historic texts might we display, driven by the editorial of the day?

It’s Banned Books Week this week, and we’re celebrating!

As Joan E. Bertin suggests over on Huffington Post, “for a country that venerates its First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, the United States tries to ban books with alarming frequency.” Sadly, it isn’t only the USA that has banned books in the past, as this list of banned books on Wikipedia shows. As Cara noted over on the shiny new Internet Archive news blog, we have scans of quite a few previously banned books for you to gaze upon, including but not limited to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:

There are also a bunch of Banned Book events and displays happening all over the USA this week if you’re interested! If you happen to know of any alternative online sources of any of these titles, please feel free to leave a comment to let us know. Or, you could add a link in the description on their Open Library pages.

On a side note, we released a little upgrade to the open source Book Reader this morning too - now you can print pages from within the book reader. There are lots of nice little touches, for example, if you’re looking at a fold-out page, the reader will change the page’s orientation on the fly to landscape. Nice work, Mang! (Mang’s the lead developer on the Book Reader. And also has a great list of beautiful books on his bookmarks page that he uses for testing.)

We’re doing some work on improving our search engine at the moment. As we release the new code, search performance may be intermittent. Apologies for the interruption, but, search will be much faster when everything settles down. We’ll drop a note in here when it’s back online.

Update, 6PM PST: We didn’t quite get as much done today as we’d planned, but search should be stable. More tomorrow!

Update, 9AM PST, 8/28: Holy search, Batman!! Before… searching on Open Library was a slog. But now! It’s a breeze! Our search guy, Paul, has been tightening knobs and flipping switches (aka making good use of SOLR stored fields), and our chief data munger, Edward, helped push out the new code this morning. Just see how fast our 24,781 bacon records show up! Then, there’s the “collection” of digitized books about cheese… Please let us know if you come across anything untoward.

I just stumbled on a beautiful, recently-scanned book about snowflakes, published in 1863. Apart from its gorgeous illustrations, the author’s opinions about snowflakes are also fascinating.

By the way, the other day we added a little link on any Internet Archive pages that are echoed in Open Library that sends you straight to our open, editable record for that item, so, if you’re surfing around the Archive’s Texts collection and you find a book we have a record for, you can just jump across and - if you’re so inclined - help to flesh out the information we have about it.

The even more interesting thing about this is that Hank (who coded up the stuff from the Archive side) simply has to construct a URL at Open Library containing an Internet Archive item ID, like this:

http://openlibrary.org/ia/snowflakeschapte00warr

This is a small step towards something much more awesome. (We should note that what makes this work is that we’re just “across the hall” from Hank, so we were able to do a little testing and tweaking to make sure the link was offered only when we could count on there being an Open Library page for the book, but still!) The hope is that external sites can send along, say, and ISBN, or an LCCN identifier to poke into Open Library and see if we have a record.

The next logical step is to make a web service that can handle this sort of inquiry. We don’t have that just yet, and current performance is slow, but, it’s really exciting and something we aim to strengthen. It would mean that people could query Open Library for records even if they don’t know an Open Library identifier (but have an alternative identifier that we know about). The current list of identifiers we can record are: Dewey, LC, ISBN 10, ISBN 13, LCCN, IA & OCLC.

Another wish is to open up the sorts of identifiers that you might attach to an Open Library catalog record, for example, from our friends over at LibraryThing, or GoodReads, or any number of awesome book sites out there. Things get interesting if you consider the possibility that there may never be a canonical identifier for a book, but rather that there will always be many different ones. That consideration allows you to open up a pipe to any identifiers we can find, which makes for many more potential connections.

Snowflakes, indeed.

It is now possible to access Open Library book metadata in an  RDF/XML format. The access is through the RESTful API. For an example, view:

http://openlibrary.org/b/OL6807502M.rdf

The returned RDF/XML relies heavily on Dublin Core metadata terms, and uses some elements from bibliontology and the registered RDA schemas. Although soundly based on RDF, the output can be used like any XML and presents (most of) the Open Library metadata in the easily understood Dublin Core terms.

It has been suggested that this format include links to cover images, where available. It is also on our list to add tables of contents to the output. Other suggestions are very welcome — add them here, or send them to the ol-tech discussion list.

We’d love to hear about the uses you make of this API, and anything we can do to help you get more out of the Open Library.

There can be more than way to say the same thing, for example gramophone record, phonograph record and vinyl records. When libraries write catalog records they pick one of these terms and sticks to it, they use what is known as a ‘controlled vocabulary‘. This makes it easier to browse library catalogs.

Traditionally it has been thought that patrons want to browse by author and subject headings, so these fields have been controlled. The data in these fields can be used in other ways, Ross Singer has been experimenting with geographic subject headings.

Publisher is an uncontrolled field. Penguin and Penguin Books are the same publisher, but their name has been entered in catalog records differently, making it difficult to browse by publisher.

A workaround is to use the ISBN field in the catalog record. Almost every book published since 1970 has an ISBN. English-language books start with a 0 or 1, followed by a variable-length publisher code, item number and finally a checksum digit.

For example: 0-14-043531-X
0 = English language
14 = Publisher code
043531 = Item number
X = checksum

We are able to build a list of ISBN publisher codes by picking the most popular publisher name, as it appears in library records, for each code. Using ISBN we can start the process of making publisher a controlled field.

The results:

• To browse: list of 2 and 3-digit publisher codes for ISBNs that start with a 0. Includes details for each code
• To download: complete list of publisher codes for ISBN that start with a 0 or 1.