Peter Brantley recently joined the Internet Archive to work on an Open Publication Distribution System.
Richard Wallis from Talis posted a great interview with Peter about his past work with the DLF and upcoming work at the Internet Archive, including Open Library, OPDS, and licensing issues around books. Check out the podcast!
Open Library suffered an unexpected outage on Thursday that lasted
through the weekend. All Open Library services have now been restored
and no data was lost. We apologize for any inconvenience this outage
may have caused.
On Thursday, the Internet Archive datacenter experienced a power
fluctuation that caused a reboot of our production database server.
Unfortunately, the database did not restart when this machine was
rebooted. Also, due to a misconfiguration, the RAID 10 device did not
automount and we were unable to mount it for some time. We placed Open
Library in read-only mode while we migrated all data to a pair of new
servers. Continue reading
Nearly 11,000 Yiddish books (half of all Yiddish books ever published) recently went online through the Internet Archive in cooperation with the National Yiddish Book Center‘s Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library. As part of this project, we’ve upgraded the Internet Archive Book Reader to support the right-to-left page progression of Yiddish books. Here is an example.
Earlier this week, Open Library was featured on the BBC Radio Labs blog. An interesting discussion has developed there, so we invite you to take a look and weigh in on the subject if you have an opinion:
In Search of Cultural Identifiers (BBC Radio Labs, January 14 2009)
Fellow OpenLibrarian, Karen Coyle reports:
OCLC has just announced that it is pushing back the date on which the new record use and transfer policy will take effect. The actual new date isn’t known, but the announcement says:
In order to allow sufficient time for feedback and discussion, implementation of the Policy will be delayed until the third quarter of the 2009 calendar year.
OCLC will form a “review board” to solicit info from members and others, and to advise the OCLC board of trustees about the policy. Jennifer Younger will chair this committee.
Read more at Karen’s blog, Coyle’s InFormation