The Making of Tree of Codes, written by Jonathan Safran Foer, constructed by Die Keure, a printing house in Belgium.
Plus a fabulous write up from the publisher, Visual Editions: “The book is as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling: here is an “enormous last day of life” that looks like it feels.” [via foe]
In these reaction snippets, I love that a chap mentions, “OK, I’m getting the hang of it now.”
Here is a diagram of the current Open Library architecture:
click for full-size image
Just discovered this wonderful book of 60 short chapters on how to start a library: A Library Primer by John Cotton Dana, Fourth Edition, published 1906 by Library Bureau.
To the librarian himself one may say: Be punctual; be attentive; help develop enthusiasm in your assistants; be neat and consistent in your manner. Be careful in your contracts; be square with your board; be concise and technical; be accurate; be courageous and self-reliant; be careful about acknowledgments; be not worshipful of your work; be careful of your health. Last of all, be yourself.
And, it’s fantastic that our Read To Me feature in the BookReader can understand the librarian’s neat hand on the page of examples in the Ink and Handwriting chapter.
Original post, 2011-03-07: The time has come for Open Library to migrate fully to the Internet Archive’s new virtual machine architecture. We expect the site to be down for about 2 hours as we move data and update various config files. Please bear with us… there are lots of balls in the air that we need to catch!
Also, we’ll post updates here if the plan changes.
Update, 11:30pm PST, 2011-03-07: Ok! The site’s back online, on brand new hardware. Everything looks about right, and we’re warming various caches and testing performance on various elements. Fingers crossed everything will warm up nicely over the next few hours. Yay!
Update, 9:30am PST, 2011-03-08: Just a little note to let you know that we’re still working on the migration. Our coverstore is struggling, and we’re tweaking our Gunicorn & lighttpd config in the new system. Apologies for the service interruption – you might see covers loading slowly, amongst other things we’re still discovering. More updates as they come to hand…
Update, 8:45am PST, 2011-03-10: Apologies for the short notice, but we’ll be bringing the site offline around 9:30am PST this morning, since we need to downgrade our lighttpd install from 1.4.26 to 1.4.19. The theory is that the newer version is still a bit unstable, and that’s part of the reason the site has been a little “bouncy” since Monday.
You might notice a few hiccups, timeouts or slow-loading pages as you wander around Open Library over the next few days. The whole Internet Archive is migrating to a new virtual machine data center, which is no mean feat.
From Open Library’s point of view, that means moving data and services to the new virtual machine configuration, and making sure that everything’s running smoothly. We’re hoping this move will result in faster performance, and flexibility for increasing hardware and improving tools into the future.
Your patience is appreciated. See you on the other side!
UPDATE, 3:25pm PST: Our cover service is spluttering at the moment. That’s affecting the whole site’s performance. We’re looking into it. Apologies for the service interruption.
UPDATE, 5:40pm PST: OK. We’re pretty sure we’ve fixed the covers trouble. Yay! Also, we’re considering taking the site offline on Sunday evening (PST) to do the heavy lifting associated with the migration to the new virtual machines. We’ll let you know as far in advance as we can exactly when and for how long.
Open Library is an initiative of the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Other projects include the Wayback Machine, archive.org, nasaimages.org, archive-it.org.
Your use of the Open Library is subject to the Internet Archive's Terms of Use.
