Monthly Archives: July 2010

Today's Downtime (is over)

We’re going to bring OpenLibrary.org offline at around 3PM Pacific Time to upgrade our database server. If all goes according to plan, this upgrade should take approximately three hours. We’ll be replacing our old spinning platter disks with modern solid state drives as part of a broader effort to improve the overall performance and reliability of the Open Library system.

We’ll post updates if they come to hand.

6PM UPDATE – Looks like it’s going to take a wee bit longer than expected to get everything copied over. And by “wee bit,” we mean another hour or so from now. If the database decides it wants to move slower, we’ll update again. Thanks so much for your patience!

7.45PM UPDATE – And, we’re back!

To The Viscountess Wolseley

MADAME, it is no modish thing,
The bookman’s tribute that I bring ;
A talk of antiquaries grey,
Dust unto dust this many a day,
Gossip of texts and bindings old,
Of faded type, and tarnish’d gold !

Can ladies care for this to-do
With Payne, Derome, and Padeloup ?
Can they resign the rout, the ball,
For lonely joys of shelf and stall?

The critic thus, serenely wise ;
But you can read with other eyes,
Whose books and bindings treasured are
‘Midst mingled spoils of peace and war ;
Shields from the fights the Mahdi lost,
And trinkets from the Golden Coast,
And many things divinely done
By Chippendale and Sheraton,

And trophies of Egyptian deeds,
And fans, and plates, and Aggrey beads,
Pomander boxes, assegais,
And sword-hilts worn in Marlbro’s days.

In this pell-mell of old and new,
Of war and peace, my essays, too,
For long in serials tempest-tost,
Are landed now, and are not lost :
Nay, on your shelf secure they lie,
As in the amber sleeps the fly.
‘Tis true, they are not ” rich nor rare ; ”
Enough, for me, that they are there !

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Library Advertainment

I hope you’ve seen the hilarious Old Spice ads popping up. Really clever actually, to write and film proper responses to people’s tweets.

On Twitter, wawoodworth wrote “ATTN LIBRARIAN TWEEPS: Need help getting @oldspice guy to say a few words regarding libraries. RT plz. Thanks.”

Bundle o' Updates

In addition to our Lending Launch last week, we’re constantly adding new bits and pieces to the site almost every day. Here’s a bunch of things we’ve been working on:

  • Over 10,000 human edits last week!
    Wow! So great to see so many people making large and small contributions to the catalog. Some standout editors include Fiction Addiction, menolly42, Anonymous (no, really), and an actually anonymous editor who has taken an interest in books written in Raeto Romance languages. We’re also seeing new books being added in a variety of languages, by R. Knoop, for example. [this is good]

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