“We’re writing to let you know that we are proud and grateful users of the Internet Archive BookReader software on our new repository of digitized materials, Digital PML”
So great! For other institutions that would like to use the BookReader can read through this documentation to help you get started.
Or, not so wild actually, it’s the Library of Congress!
We were thrilled to see our BookReader on the read.gov site today. The Library is using it to showcase of some gorgeous books from their Rare Book Collection, like “A Wonder-Book for Girls & Boys,” “The Baby’s Own Aesop,” and “A Christmas Carol.”
You might also be interested to follow along with a “book in progress” called The Exquisite Corpse Adventure, “an episodic progressive story game” with more than 20 contributors.
There’s information about the BookReader software on the Open Library site if you’re code-y too. We love it when the BookReader gets used!
A few hours ago we released a couple of new bits and pieces we thought it was worth mentioning.
First, we’ve re-arranged the way search results display so our search facets are more obvious, there’s a new cover view, and the pagination is tidier.
You’ve always been able to see facets on the search page, but we were trying to find a way to make them more exploratory and interactive – hopefully, this redesign is a start. So, you can click on a facet to narrow your search, then another, and another. It starts to get interesting when you remove previously selected facets from the search, and begin to move sideways through the catalogue. (The team has wasted some hours playing with this!)
As I was bouncing around, I found a few gems, including 6 digitized books about the Masai, written between 1857 and 1905, including the fascinating Vocabulary of the Enguduk Iloigob and Through Masai land: a journey of exploration among the snowclad volcanic mountains and strange tribes of eastern equatorial Africa.
There’s also Cookery recipes by St. Mary’s Guild, Mill Valley, California – just around the corner from us here in San Francisco – published in 1902 and available to read online. Pickles, Marmalades, Jellies, Preserves is “swooning in sweetness” on Page 71, and the scan is full of hand-written notes, as any good cookbook should be!
And, as NASA celebrates the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo mission, here’s a bit of Mars-related science fiction to whet your appetite. If you like space stuff, you’ll love the collection of fantastic 16mm videos shot on board Apollo, hosted over at nasaimages.org, another project of the Internet Archive.
The other cool thing that we released is integration with the new, improved book reader available on archive.org. Improvements include a one-page view, access to the full resolution of the original scan (in that one page view), and the ability to link into a specific page in a scanned book, just by grabbing the URL in the navigation bar whenever you’re looking at a certain page, like I did above to link to Page 71 of the cookery book. (The URL updates on the fly as you turn the pages – super cool!) There’s more information over at the Open Content Alliance blog.
We’d love to hear what you think of the new search results page, so please leave us a comment!
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.
Open Library recently launched a web demonstration designed to illustrate how Internet Archive book collections can be viewed on the OLPC XO Laptop.
We invite you to take a look!
It is still in the early stages, and is built on open source software using an embeddable AJAX reader and a software component known as Carousel which scrolls through the collection of books on the right.
We would like to have feedback on how to improve the user experience of this demonstration and its underlying components for users of the OLPC XO and Open Library.