[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.
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.
Wonderful stuff! The Library of Congress has just released more than 10,000 digitized 78s from the Victor Talking Machine Company as a National Jukebox. The recordings are lovely and crackly, as if you’re listening on a gramaphone.
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.
We have done some improvements to coverstore, the Open Library book covers service, recently.
Now it is possible to access book covers by all the available identifiers. For example: