Category Archives: Uncategorized

Improved Set Up for Developers

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Over the last few months, a handful of the developers at the Internet Archive have begun working more closely with Open Library code, where previously, the project was more isolated and had really only been worked on by the core team of, well, two: Anand & Edward. Apart from more fun collaborating with colleagues across the Archive, this increased exposure of the Open Library code base has been profoundly useful for the project. Apart from the very useful fresh perspectives and questions, it’s also led to an improved toolset for getting a developer’s instance of Open Library up and running on your local machine – so important when you’re trying to find your way around a new system.

The cherry on top is an install script for Linux, written by Raj Kumar, on top of the awesome work done by Michael Ang (Mang) to prepare for our recent Lending launch. The updated docs are here:

http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/setup

This is a bit of a milestone for us – making the codebase more accessible and easier to work with is something we’ve wanted for ages, so it’s nice to see it well on its way.

Open Library Ore: A MySQL data dump is available

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A while back, Ben Gimpert - click to visit Ben's websiteBen Gimpert wrote a guest post for us called Open Library Ore, explaining how he had begun to hack on the massive full text corpus on the Internet Archive, practising various Natural Language Processing techniques to begin to teach machines to glean topics of books by sheer letter crunching. Turns out the elements in the ore are beginning to emerge, particularly in the form of a dataset available for download under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 CC license… Please, if you know SQL, why not download the dataset and see what you can find out? We’d love to hear any discoveries you make, perhaps in the comments?

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Today's Downtime (is over)

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We’re going to bring OpenLibrary.org offline at around 3PM Pacific Time to upgrade our database server. If all goes according to plan, this upgrade should take approximately three hours. We’ll be replacing our old spinning platter disks with modern solid state drives as part of a broader effort to improve the overall performance and reliability of the Open Library system.

We’ll post updates if they come to hand.

6PM UPDATE – Looks like it’s going to take a wee bit longer than expected to get everything copied over. And by “wee bit,” we mean another hour or so from now. If the database decides it wants to move slower, we’ll update again. Thanks so much for your patience!

7.45PM UPDATE – And, we’re back!

To The Viscountess Wolseley

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MADAME, it is no modish thing,
The bookman’s tribute that I bring ;
A talk of antiquaries grey,
Dust unto dust this many a day,
Gossip of texts and bindings old,
Of faded type, and tarnish’d gold !

Can ladies care for this to-do
With Payne, Derome, and Padeloup ?
Can they resign the rout, the ball,
For lonely joys of shelf and stall?

The critic thus, serenely wise ;
But you can read with other eyes,
Whose books and bindings treasured are
‘Midst mingled spoils of peace and war ;
Shields from the fights the Mahdi lost,
And trinkets from the Golden Coast,
And many things divinely done
By Chippendale and Sheraton,

And trophies of Egyptian deeds,
And fans, and plates, and Aggrey beads,
Pomander boxes, assegais,
And sword-hilts worn in Marlbro’s days.

In this pell-mell of old and new,
Of war and peace, my essays, too,
For long in serials tempest-tost,
Are landed now, and are not lost :
Nay, on your shelf secure they lie,
As in the amber sleeps the fly.
‘Tis true, they are not ” rich nor rare ; ”
Enough, for me, that they are there !

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