Open Library Blog

Hello! I’ve just joined the Open Library team as Project Lead. In this, my second week, I’m still finding my feet and getting to know everyone. The future looks really, really bright thanks to the amazing foundation already in place at Open Library. We have around 23 million books in our catalogue, over 1 million of which are available to read or download for free right now. The team has done an absolutely amazing job of drawing catalogue records from disparate libraries and connecting them all under openlibrary.org.

As I was finding my way last week, it just so happened that Brewster Kahle was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! about the current state of the Google Books Settlement - the perfect induction! (Brewster’s interview starts at around 13:55 minutes in.)

This blog post by Ryan Singel also came in handy: The Fight over the Google of all Libraries: A Wired FAQ.

Peter Brantley recently joined the Internet Archive to work on an Open Publication Distribution System.

Richard Wallis from Talis posted a great interview with Peter about his past work with the DLF and upcoming work at the Internet Archive, including Open Library, OPDS, and licensing issues around books. Check out the podcast!

Open Library suffered an unexpected outage on Thursday that lasted
through the weekend. All Open Library services have now been restored
and no data was lost. We apologize for any inconvenience this outage
may have caused.

On Thursday, the Internet Archive datacenter experienced a power
fluctuation that caused a reboot of our production database server.
Unfortunately, the database did not restart when this machine was
rebooted. Also, due to a misconfiguration, the RAID 10 device did not
automount and we were unable to mount it for some time. We placed Open
Library in read-only mode while we migrated all data to a pair of new
servers.

We have received twelve new servers for Open Library and will be
moving all services to redundant hardware in order to improve
reliability.

Thanks for your patience,
The Open Library Team

Fellow OpenLibrarian, Karen Coyle reports:

OCLC has just announced that it is pushing back the date on which the new record use and transfer policy will take effect. The actual new date isn’t known, but the announcement says:

In order to allow sufficient time for feedback and discussion, implementation of the Policy will be delayed until the third quarter of the 2009 calendar year.

OCLC will form a “review board” to solicit info from members and others, and to advise the OCLC board of trustees about the policy. Jennifer Younger will chair this committee.

Read more at Karen’s blog, Coyle’s InFormation

Best wishes for the New Year from the Open Library team!

This year has been a busy year for us, and we’re happy to have met a lot of our goals for 2008:

• This year we dramatically grew the site. Open Library now has 23 million pages about books and authors.
• We added Full-Text search, and now have more than 1 million books in our full-text search engine.
• We launched Scan-On-Demand, which allows you request a public domain book from the Boston Public Library to be scanned. Open Library will deliver a PDF of the book to you in about a week, and the digital copy will be available for others to read online as well.
• We launched a new open source AJAX bookreader, which is now in beta testing on the archive.org site.
• We launched a JSON API, a book covers API, and a Javascript API to help developers interact with Open Library.

We’re looking forward to making the site even better in 2009! We hope you have a great year!

Welcome to the Open Library Blog. This site will have the latest news about openlibrary.org.

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