http://blog.openlibrary.org One web page for every book. Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:50:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There is some really lovely stuff happening around the internet about books at the moment. Here's just one thing I stumbled on that's absolutely gorgeous. One Book, Many Readings by Christian Swinehart It's a series of visualizations and commentary on what it means to move through a Choose Your Own Adventure ... http://blog.openlibrary.org/2009/11/12/choose-your-own-adventure/ You may have to be of a certain age to appreciate this, but... here we go. http://blog.openlibrary.org/2009/11/08/just-because-its-the-weekend/ Or, not so wild actually, it's the Library of Congress! We were thrilled to see our BookReader on the read.gov site today. The Library is using it to showcase of some gorgeous books from their Rare Book Collection, like "A Wonder-Book for Girls & Boys," "The Baby's Own Aesop," and ... http://blog.openlibrary.org/2009/10/28/internet-archives-bookreader-out-in-the-wild/ We're planning for a scheduled downtime on Wednesday, October 28 for hardware upgrade of Open Library servers. Open Library will be unavailable for 2 hours during 7:00 AM PST - 9:00 AM PST. We'll post here when the site's back online. Update at 8:36am: And we're back! http://blog.openlibrary.org/2009/10/27/scheduled-downtime/ I was listening to the radio over my morning coffee this morning when I heard that today is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's birthday. I thought I'd have a peek and see if Open Library holds references to any of his writings. Turns out we do. From Third Class in Indian Railways, one ... http://blog.openlibrary.org/2009/10/02/happy-birthday-m-k-gandhi/ It's Banned Books Week this week, and we're celebrating! As Joan E. Bertin suggests over on Huffington Post, "for a country that venerates its First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, the United States tries to ban books with alarming frequency." Sadly, it isn't only the USA that has banned ... http://blog.openlibrary.org/2009/09/28/a-celebration-of-banned-books/ We're doing some work on improving our search engine at the moment. As we release the new code, search performance may be intermittent. Apologies for the interruption, but, search will be much faster when everything settles down. We'll drop a note in here when it's back online. Update, 6PM PST: We ... http://blog.openlibrary.org/2009/08/26/search-downtime/ 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 ... http://blog.openlibrary.org/2009/08/19/snowflakes/ 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, ... http://blog.openlibrary.org/2009/08/11/api-with-rdfxml-output-available/ There can be more than way to say the same thing, for example gramophone record, phonograph record and vinyl records. When libraries write catalog records they pick one of these terms and sticks to it, they use what is known as a 'controlled vocabulary'. This makes it easier to browse ... http://blog.openlibrary.org/2009/07/20/isbn-publisher-codes/