Archive for May, 2010

Donate a book to the Book Drive!

By George Oates

The Internet Archive is having an old-fashioned Book Drive to gather donations to supplement our digital book archive. If you post a book (or three) to the Internet Archive Book Drive, 300 Funston Ave, San Francisco, CA 94118, we’ll scan it and add it to the Archive. Thanks to existing foundation funding, we are also sponsoring the scanning of the first 10,000 books that are donated in this Book Drive. We are also seeking financial support to continue the scanning operations that the Internet Archive has been doing for some years now.

For more information on the Book Drive, and specifics of where to send your book (or financial) donations, please visit the Book Drive page on Open Library.

Although you’re certainly welcome to pop over to your favourite online bookseller, buy a book and send it to us, you might like to have some fun creating your own personal “Ex Libris” bookplate to put in any books you donate. If you do, your bookplate will be photographed as part of the standard digitization process, and your bookplate will be permanently associated with any books you donate to the Book Drive. This isn’t a requirement for your donation – just something fun!

Here are some examples of Creative-Commons licensed bookplate images from Flickr you might like to use for inspiration:

In the Stacks
In the Stacks

Also, I wanted to link to a Radio 4 program from May 25, 2010 about the Internet Archive and the new Open Library site. As well as talking to Brewster Kahle in general about one million accessible books in DAISY format, the “In Touch” radio show interviewed Leonie Watson and Ian Macrae as they tried out the site, and although had some difficulty, were able to find accessible books.

Further to our previous post about accessibility of the Open Library site, we’re continuing to do user testing with sight-impaired people here in San Francisco, and Leonie and Ian’s feedback is also really useful. It was fascinating to hear how quickly Ian’s screen reader read the site to him! And, we certainly acknowledge Leonie’s comment that there is a huge amount of data to sift through (on a Work page to get to a usable book’s file) if you’re absorbing the page aurally. We’ve begun implementing some “skip this bit” hidden links that get screen readers past things like the navigation bar, so perhaps we could use a few more of them in the body of pages to help people get straight to the meat!

Feedback like this is extremely helpful, and we’ll make improvements wherever we can. We want to make it as easy as we can for everyone to find a book to read!

Posted on May 26, 2010 at 3:03am - 2 Comments »

Over 1 Million Digital Books Now Available Free to the Print-Disabled

By George Oates

More than doubling the number of books available to print disabled people of all ages, today the Internet Archive launched a new service that brings free access to more than 1 million books – from classic 19th Century fiction and current novels to technical guides and research materials – now available in the specially designed format to support those who are blind, dyslexic or otherwise visually impaired.

Read the full press release on archive.org

Part of this announcement was to tell people about the brand new, rebuilt Open Library, which came online yesterday. Knowing that the site would be a new front door to books for print-disabled and visually impaired visitors, we had to make sure that it was accessible, both at the code level, and on all sorts of browsers and devices.

Luckily, one of the team, Lance Arthur, is a total markup rockstar who has been working to web standards throughout the reconstruction of the Open Library site. But, we wanted to make sure, so we’ve worked with several people, tools and organizations over the last month or so to test our accessibility from a variety of angles.

Mike, George, Jessie (and Nacho)
L-R: Mike McCabe, Me, Jessie

This is a picture of Mike McCabe (Internet Archive staffer responsible for generating these new accessible DAISY files), me and the fabulous Jessie Lorenz, who worked with us on what it was like to use Open Library as a blind person. It was amazing to watch her jump around the site using the keyboard and some screenreading software called Jaws. A entirely different experience to what I’m used to. Jessie suggested a number of straightforward tweaks that we could make to help make the site more navigable. For example:

  • Make sure we have title/alt attributes on everything,
  • Add the total result count for a search results page into the <h1> so she didn’t have to go search for it;
  • Describe the graph on the Subject pages in plain English (before all the numbers) – “There is a graph on this page that displays the publishing history for this subject. On the x-axis is time, and on the y-axis is the count of editions published.”
  • Make sure we labelled the top/bottom search fields differently, even though they do the same thing, and more.

Thank you, Jessie!

Jessie talks to Lance &amp; George Jessie Lorenz
Jessie & Lance; Jessie and her lovely pup, Nacho

We also used the W3C Markup Validation Service to check out our pages at the code level, and have passed with flying colours for virtually every page on the site, and made sure all understood and listened to what Open Library sounds like, through the use of a simulator for the Jaws Screen Reader software, which is unfortunately very expensive.

So, back to the announcement we made this morning. The easiest way to access the over 1 million accessible books on Open Library is to head for our new “Accessible Books” subject page that displays them all or to search within them. (There’s a link to that subject page on the new Open Library home page.)

There’s more information about the special DAISY accessible eBook format in the Open Library FAQ, and here’s a useful video from Open XML that explains more about being visually impaired and DAISY:

We’re really excited – not just about the new Open Library site finally being revealed to all, but to be a part of delivering a massive, new, free resource to so many people. It was also a pleasure to collaborate with lots of other Internet Archive staff, so thank you to Brewster Kahle, Jon Hornstein, Mike McCabe, Hank Bromley, Alexis Rossi, Raj Kumar, Sam Stoller, Laura Milvy, Jeff Kaplan, Karen Coyle, Mary Murrell, Calvin Yee, Ralf Muehlen and Michael Ang for all your awesome support.

Posted on May 6, 2010 at 10:10pm - 6 Comments »
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Relaunch is complete!

By George Oates

Hello! Just wanted to let you know that we’ve just begun the process of launching our redesigned Open Library site. This may mean that there are a few hiccups along the way, but we hope to be through the woods as soon as possible.

We’ll post back here as soon as it’s stable, and in the meantime, If you spot anything obviously broken or weird, please leave us a comment.

Update, 6:56PM: OK. It’s been about 3 hours since we flipped the switch, and the new site seems to be holding together. Yay! We’ll be posting more about the redesign over the coming days – there are a ton of changes we’d like to highlight specifically, like the fact that we’ve shifted to using CC0 for any edits made to the records on Open Library.

Please be aware there are a few features which have been put on ice temporarily  – full text search and managing the site in multiple languages for example. We want to devote proper attention to improving those features as soon as we can. They will return!

More to come…

Posted on May 5, 2010 at 10:10pm - 3 Comments »

Open Library URLs are changing

By

We are in the process of upgrading the openlibrary.org website to include the new functionality.

As part of this upgrade, the URLs of the openlibrary.org website will change from /a/, /b/, /l/ and /user/ to /authors/, /books/, /languages/ and /people/ respectively. After this change, the old URLs will get redirected to the new ones.

We are not anticipating any downtime during this process. However, there could be momentary failures in loading some pages.

We’ll post here once the change is over.

Posted on May 2, 2010 at 2:02am - 2 Comments »