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.
BBC Radio Labs: In Search of Cultural Identifiers
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)
OCLC pushes back policy to fall, 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
Happy New Year!
Best wishes for the New Year from the Open Library team!
This year has been a busy year for us, and we’re happy to have met a lot of our goals for 2008:
- This year we dramatically grew the site. Open Library now has 23 million pages about books and authors.
- We added Full-Text search, and now have more than 1 million books in our full-text search engine.
- We launched Scan-On-Demand, which allows you request a public domain book from the Boston Public Library to be scanned. Open Library will deliver a PDF of the book to you in about a week, and the digital copy will be available for others to read online as well.
- We launched a new open source AJAX bookreader, which is now in beta testing on the archive.org site.
- We launched a JSON API, a book covers API, and a Javascript API to help developers interact with Open Library.
We’re looking forward to making the site even better in 2009! We hope you have a great year!
OpenBook WordPress Plugin
The OpenBook WordPress Plugin by John Miedema can be used to easily reference books from inside your WordPress blog and automatically pull covers and book data from Open Library.
We’re quite excited to see people using Open Library and building new tools using our public APIs.
Here’s an example of using the plugin:
[openbook booknumber=”0143034650″]
This book was pulled in by using this tag in the WordPress post:
[openbook booknumber="0143034650"]
The “booknumber” in this case is an ISBN book identifier and is causing a search behind the scenes.
You can also use the Open Library opaque IDs to refer to a book when the ISBN isn’t available (e.g. for books published before ISBN existed!)
In that case your link would look like this:
[openbook booknumber="/b/OL14015131M"]
Many of the Open Library books (particularly older ones) do not have a cover associated with them, but you can add one from the Open Library page for that book!
The OpenBook article in the Code4Lib journal describes some of the design decisions and implementation. (Note: the article mentions the old [openbook]0864921535[/openbook] way of using the openbook shortcode. The newer [openbook booknumber="0864921535"] style should now be used instead.)