Lepidoptera

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European butterflies and moths European Butterflies and Moths

Gawd, this redesign is getting so exciting we can hardly bear it! Metamorphosis, eat your heart out! We’re very close to calling a lot of the new pages finished, although we expect to continue improving things after we do our soft launch.

I found these beautiful plates in a book called European Butterflies and Moths. There’s a huge collection of gorgeous old things in the Smithsonian Libraries collection on archive.org.

This post was somewhat inspired by a juicy thread over on the NGC4LIB mailing list. What is a butterfly?

Happy Australia Day!

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Please excuse my national pride leaking out on to the Open Library blog, but, there are some wonderful classic Australian books in the catalog that I’d like to share with you.

While The Billy Boils by Henry Lawson

Woman and her Possibilities, a lecture delivered in 1913 in my home town of Adelaide, South Australia, by W. Ramsay Smith.

That’s enough about Australia, lovely as it is. We also wanted to let you know that a friend of the Internet Archive, David Rumsey, has been busy digitizing his wonderful collection of maps and geographical books, for example, The California Water Atlas, which is full to the brim with gorgeous illustrations, timely given all the rain we’ve had in San Francisco this month.

Sneak Peek

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we’ve been working hard on reconstructing Open Library, and it’s getting to that exciting stage when the redesign is starting to feel alive, and full of real data.

One thing we’re producing is a new page about a certain subject that shows a list of all the Works about that subject, authors that write about it, publishers that publish books in that area, and a graph that shows the publishing history of that subject – all generated from bibliographic data and our shiny new search!

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Season's Greetings

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If you’re looking for something to read during the holidays, do consider fossicking about the treasures we have in Open Library.

I’ve had a quick look and found some lovely old things…

Megilat hanukah by A. Hayman et al., and abridged edition of the Maimonides Mishneh Torah.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, a ghost story about Christmas, featuring the curmudgeonly Ebenezer Scrooge.

Chanukah Sketch by Ruth E. Levi, a short play about Father Time and his inquisitive visitor. Continue reading →

An update on Open Library

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It’s been some months since we’ve updated you about what the Open Library is up to. Sorry about that. Thought it might be nice to produce a novella/brain dump to let you know where we’re at.

The short answer is: all sorts of things! I’ve been leading the project now for about 6 months, and have finally settled down enough to tell you what we’re up to. We’d love to hear what you think of our ideas perhaps in the comments of this post, or on our general discussion mailing list.

The Open Library project began in February of 2007, and launched in November that year, so it’s approaching 3 years old. During that time, we’ve amassed one of the biggest virtual library catalogs online, at some 23 million edition entries and some 6 million or so author records. We also have a ton of book covers. Our catalog is entirely open and free to use. You can download everything if you wish, or use our API to either link to our records, or to display Open Library data on your website.

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