I’ve just returned from a trip to Wellington where I presented about Open Library to the people assembled at KohaCon10. I had a lovely time meeting everyone involved, and was thoroughly impressed by the community that surrounds this 10 year old, successful open source project. A hearty congratulations to everyone involved! At the end of the conference, we were shown a fabulous Gource source code visualization of “10 years in 10 minutes,” which visualizes 10 years of Koha development. Seriously cool.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Stability Improvements
The openlibrary.org website used to become unavailable for short durations whenever we deployed new code. This was a due a problem in lighttpd fastcgi handling. Now we switched to gunicorn, a brand new web server in Python, and that solved this problem. Code deploys are now very smooth and this is a major step towards improving the overall stability of the system.
Reading Desk 2.0
We’re busily preparing for tomorrow and Friday’s Books in Browsers conference here at the Internet Archive. In terms of the Open Library, the meeting will herald the release of a flurry of new features, including our new Full Text search and a redesign of the Internet Archive BookReader. (More on those later.)
It just so happens that when we moved into our new home — formerly a Christian Science Church — we inherited a bunch of furniture, including some classic old reading desks that came out of the church’s reading room. We’ve given them an update, and thanks to Raj, you can see Reading Desk 2.0:
Reading Desk 2.0, built by Jermaine, soon to be running the new IA touch bookreader!
Reading Desk 2.0, June, Brewster, Jermaine, Chris
Brewster at the Desk
Woo!
The Precious Hand of Isaac Newton
We had some welcome visitors at our weekly Books meeting this morning: the coordinators of the Internet Archive’s scanning efforts, from 21 scanning centers around the planet. It was great to hear from Andy, who runs the scanning out of Boston Public Library, who mentioned how happy BPL are to have scanned one of their most prized volumes. It’s a copy of Opticks by Isaac Newton, owned and inscribed by the author himself.
It’s goosebump-inducing to see annotations in Newton’s own hand, and I particularly like all the “old-time post-it notes” in the front of the volume that warn not to let this book leave the library.
Why Computers Can't Do The Job
As we work towards a re-release of full text search on Open Library (peek), we’ve seen much more of the OCR output of our book scans. Depending on the text, the OCR can range from 99% perfect to 99% covered in gobbledygook. Hence my delight to see oldweather.org from the Zooniverse Project, where you and I can “help improve reconstructions of past weather and climate across the world by finding and recording historical weather observations in handwritten Royal Navy ship logs.”
Why computers can’t do the job from National Maritime Museum on Vimeo.