Why Computers Can't Do The Job

Posted on October 12, 2010 by

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.

Continue reading →

Merge Authors: The Screencast

Posted on September 21, 2010 by

Thanks again to Super Intern, Megan for creating this excellent screencast about merging authors on Open Library. It’s been a fantastically successful release so far, resulting in over 100,000 edits in the last 28 days! You can watch merges as they happen in the new Author Merges recent changes view. Thanks, Megan!

Editing is back!

Posted on September 20, 2010 by

We’ve been shifting around the way Open Library edit URLs work for Editions, Authors and Work pages, and there’s a glitch. We’re working on it – ~~should be back shortly~~.

Update, 1pm, 9/20: And, we’re back!

Faster book covers

Posted on September 19, 2010 by

We did some performance and stability improvements to covers.openlibrary.org recently. Accessing book covers by ISBNs is quite faster now than before.

The covers.openlibrary.org website used to face intermittent internal errors because of memory leaks in the fastcgi library that was used. We switched to gunicorn server now and that solved this issue.

Please be aware that the OL covers API is intended for displaying book covers in other websites and not for bulk download. If you need to download book covers in bulk, please get in touch with us, we’ll be glad to help!

Reading Animals

Posted on September 8, 2010 by

The Library at Night is one of my favourite books. It’s strongly influenced my thinking here at Open Library, and I definitely recommend you read it. I was excited to learn this morning via @MargaretAtwood that Mr. Manguel has released a new book, All Men Are Liars. (Review on acommonreader.org.)

As I was wandering about his website, I stumbled on this passage by Jean-Luc Terradillos on alberto.manguel.com, which I think bears repeating…