Archive for the ‘Data’ Category
Joyeux anniversaire, Monsieur Verne!
“The expander of horizons,” is what a noted critic called Jules Verne. He was the prophet, the foreseer and foreteller of our great mechanical age.”1
Jules Verne, one of the “fathers of science fiction,” was born today, back in 1828. He wrote several hundred tales about travels to exotic locales in incredible machines. Science fiction’s other father is Englishman H. G. Wells, born about 40 years later. Apparently, Verne is also one of the most translated author in history, second only to Agatha Christie in his global reach2.
The opening paragraphs of one of his most famous stories, 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, will give you a hint:
The year 1866 was signalized by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Not to mention rumors which agitated the maritime population, and excited the public mind, even in the interior of continents, seafaring men were particularly excited. Merchants, commons sailors, captains of vessels, skippers, both of Europe and America, naval officers of all countries, and the governments of several states on the two continents, were deeply interested in the matter.
For some time past, vessels had been met by “an enormous thing,” a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid and its movements than a whale. Read on?
After poking around the library a little, I found the 1900 Hetzel edition of Voyage au Centre de la Terre full of gorgeous illustrations. I also uncovered a few scanned volumes of the complete Works of Jules Verne, in particular Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 4. (There may be more available online… In the 1911 edition, I see that 15 volumes were published originally, in 600 numbered copies.)
Update: Feb 19, 2010 – Spotted these gorgeous cover designs by Jim Tierney over on Vimeo:
Jules Verne cover designs by Jim Tierney from Jim Tierney on Vimeo.
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Jules Verne cover designs by Jim Tierney from Jim Tierney on Vimeo.
Snowflakes
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.
API with RDF/XML output available
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.
Mathematics in book titles
I’ve just found three books by J. Peter May with descriptions of mathematics notation in the title:
- E [sign for infinity] ring spaces and E [sign for infinity] ring spectra
- [The mathematical expression for infinite loop] ring spaces and [The mathematical expression for infinite loop] ring spectra
- E [infinity subscript] ring spaces and E [infinity subscript] ring spectra
It is difficult to write software that can tell these titles are the same, yet they are. The Open Library book merging code has failed to recognize these are all the same book, and so we have three records in the database, where there should be one.
I wonder how often descriptions of mathematical notation appear in bibliographic records; this is the first time I’ve seen it.