Monthly Archives: May 2011

openlibrary.org downtime (resolved)

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Apologies for the service interruption. Our new Virtual Machine Environment hiccuped this morning, and we’re shaking out the process we need to go through to restart everything smoothly. Covers should be being served normally from covers.openlibrary.org using ISBN or other supported identifiers.

I’ll update here if there’s relevant news – hopefully it won’t be down much longer.

Update, 4:00PM PST: OK. We’re stable again now. Damn race conditions in Linux kernels!

Update, 10:00PM PST: The website is down again.

Update, May 17 2:00AM PST: We’re back online now. But, covers.openlibrary.org is offline, which unfortunately means that external sites accessing Open Library covers using ISBNs is also offline. Covers on openlibrary.org are being served from an alternate location. (We need to wrangle some DNS settings to get this fixed, hopefully within a few hours.)

Internet Archive is launching a Physical Archive

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[Reposted from the main Internet Archive blog.]

Everyone is welcome to the open-house and launch of the new Physical Archive of the Internet Archive in Richmond, California on Sunday June 5th from 4-8pm.

The new Internet Archive facility in Richmond, California, click to enlarge

After 2 years of prototyping and testing a new design for sustainable long-term preservation of physical books records and movies, we are starting with over 300,000 books and gearing up for millions.

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The Little Bot That Could

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homebuying is lots and lots of paperwork

Meet oclcBot. He was written by Bruce Washburn at OCLC Research to help connect Open Library records to Worldcat.org. He’s just finished updating almost 4 million Open Library editions with links! No metadata exchange at all, except these identifiers. Tiny, but powerful, because that lets systems that “speak OCLC” communicate directly with Open Library without knowing any Open Library IDs. As Anand mentioned in his recent post about Coverstore Improvements, we’ve also made the system for displaying covers externally using other types of identifiers more efficient.

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