Category Archives: Uncategorized

Internet Archive's BookReader out in the wild

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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 “A Christmas Carol.”

You might also be interested to follow along with a “book in progress” called The Exquisite Corpse Adventure, “an episodic progressive story game” with more than 20 contributors.

There’s information about the BookReader software on the Open Library site if you’re code-y too. We love it when the BookReader gets used!

Happy Birthday M. K. Gandhi

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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 of a short series of essays including The Moral Basis of Co-operation, published in 1917:

The compartment itself was evil looking. Dirt was lying thick upon the wood work and I do not know that it had ever seen soap or water. (From Page 5)

Or from A Guide To Health, published in 1921.

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A Celebration of Banned Books

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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 books in the past, as this list of banned books on Wikipedia shows. As Cara noted over on the shiny new Internet Archive news blog, we have scans of quite a few previously banned books for you to gaze upon, including but not limited to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:

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Search performance!

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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 didn’t quite get as much done today as we’d planned, but search should be stable. More tomorrow!

Update, 9AM PST, 8/28: Holy search, Batman!! Before… searching on Open Library was a slog. But now! It’s a breeze! Our search guy, Paul, has been tightening knobs and flipping switches (aka making good use of SOLR stored fields), and our chief data munger, Edward, helped push out the new code this morning. Just see how fast our 24,781 bacon records show up! Then, there’s the “collection” of digitized books about cheese… Please let us know if you come across anything untoward.