Category Archives: Uncategorized

A Library Primer

Posted on March 18, 2011 by

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.

Scheduled Downtime: (Again) 9:30AM PST, 2011-03-10

Posted on March 8, 2011 by

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!

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Heads Up! Data Center Migration in progress

Posted on March 3, 2011 by

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.

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Get Thee to a Library!

Posted on February 22, 2011 by

For our first big release of 2011, we’d like to introduce you to a couple of new bits and pieces on Open Library:

A new home page design
When we launched the site redesign almost a year ago, the home page was trying to make it clear that it was possible to edit the Open Library site, and that we welcome your contributions. You might remember the cheeky “Ever wanted to play librarian?” phrase. Now that the new design has settled somewhat, and we have a great level of activity across the site, we wanted to shift the focus again, to make it clearer that you can actually get to books as well. Not only over 1 million free eBooks, but also our small, but growing Lending Library.

So, the new home page displays 3 new “carousels” that display an assortment of free eBooks to read, a small curated selection of titles from the Lending Library, and Version 1 of a new “Return Cart” feature, that shows you eBooks that have, well, been recently returned.

We’ve also added some activity graphs at the bottom of the page, which tell you that in the last 28 days (at time of writing), we’ve had:
- 5,794,587 unique visitors,
- 14,219 new members sign up,
- 39,939 edits to the catalog,
- 990 new lists created, and
- 3,340 eBooks borrowed.
Wow!
The “In Library” lending program
In one small step for library kind and readers around the world, today we’re announcing a new collection of “In Library” eBooks available for loan. Here’s the idea: there’s a group of libraries participating in the pilot program, each of which has added eBooks to the new pool.

See a map displaying the participating libraries – Yay OpenStreetMap!

The interesting part is that you, dear patron, need to get your bones into the actual libraries themselves to borrow any of the titles from any of the libraries in the pool. Once you’ve done that, the loan acts just like the “normal” Lending Library loans that are available to any Open Library account holder around the world, 5 books at a time, for up to 2 weeks. Cool, huh?