Archive for January, 2010

Lepidoptera

By George Oates

European butterflies and moths European Butterflies and Moths

Gawd, this redesign is getting so exciting we can hardly bear it! Metamorphosis, eat your heart out! We’re very close to calling a lot of the new pages finished, although we expect to continue improving things after we do our soft launch.

I found these beautiful plates in a book called European Butterflies and Moths. There’s a huge collection of gorgeous old things in the Smithsonian Libraries collection on archive.org.

This post was somewhat inspired by a juicy thread over on the NGC4LIB mailing list. What is a butterfly?

Posted on January 26, 2010 at 8:08pm - Comments Off

Happy Australia Day!

By George Oates

Please excuse my national pride leaking out on to the Open Library blog, but, there are some wonderful classic Australian books in the catalog that I’d like to share with you.

While The Billy Boils by Henry Lawson

Woman and her Possibilities, a lecture delivered in 1913 in my home town of Adelaide, South Australia, by W. Ramsay Smith.

That’s enough about Australia, lovely as it is. We also wanted to let you know that a friend of the Internet Archive, David Rumsey, has been busy digitizing his wonderful collection of maps and geographical books, for example, The California Water Atlas, which is full to the brim with gorgeous illustrations, timely given all the rain we’ve had in San Francisco this month.

Posted on January 26, 2010 at 6:06pm - Comments Off

Sneak Peek

By George Oates

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we’ve been working hard on reconstructing Open Library, and it’s getting to that exciting stage when the redesign is starting to feel alive, and full of real data.

One thing we’re producing is a new page about a certain subject that shows a list of all the Works about that subject, authors that write about it, publishers that publish books in that area, and a graph that shows the publishing history of that subject – all generated from bibliographic data and our shiny new search!

Here’s my favourite so far: fondue.

This is getting exciting!

It probably goes without saying, but there was a bump in fondue books around 1970. I’ll sprinkle a few more sneak peeks of the new design from now until we do our soft launch. Coming soon!

Update: I couldn’t resist sharing a few more…

internet

marilyn

And this final comparison is really interesting. For all the order of library cataloging, it’s funny how much difference your native tongue can make. I love how the birth of the Industrial Age is represented in literature this way…

terms

Posted on January 13, 2010 at 9:09pm - 5 Comments »
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