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
There is some really lovely stuff happening around the internet about books at the moment. Here’s just one thing I stumbled on that’s absolutely gorgeous.
One Book, Many Readings by Christian Swinehart
It’s a series of visualizations and commentary on what it means to move through a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and what sort of book you end up with if you just construct various scaffolding around places and events instead of providing a directed beginning-to-end narrative.
It’s Banned Books Week this week, and we’re celebrating!
As Joan E. Bertin suggests over on Huffington Post, “for a country that venerates its First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, the United States tries to ban books with alarming frequency.” Sadly, it isn’t only the USA that has banned books in the past, as this list of banned books on Wikipedia shows. As Cara noted over on the shiny new Internet Archive news blog, we have scans of quite a few previously banned books for you to gaze upon, including but not limited to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:
I just stumbled on a beautiful, recently-scanned book about snowflakes, published in 1863. Apart from its gorgeous illustrations, the author’s opinions about snowflakes are also fascinating.
By the way, the other day we added a little link on any Internet Archive pages that are echoed in Open Library that sends you straight to our open, editable record for that item, so, if you’re surfing around the Archive’s Texts collection and you find a book we have a record for, you can just jump across and – if you’re so inclined – help to flesh out the information we have about it.
There can be more than way to say the same thing, for example gramophone record, phonograph record and vinyl records. When libraries write catalog records they pick one of these terms and sticks to it, they use what is known as a ‘controlled vocabulary‘. This makes it easier to browse library catalogs.
Traditionally it has been thought that patrons want to browse by author and subject headings, so these fields have been controlled. The data in these fields can be used in other ways, Ross Singer has been experimenting with geographic subject headings.
Publisher is an uncontrolled field. Penguin and Penguin Books are the same publisher, but their name has been entered in catalog records differently, making it difficult to browse by publisher.
A workaround is to use the ISBN field in the catalog record. Almost every book published since 1970 has an ISBN. English-language books start with a 0 or 1, followed by a variable-length publisher code, item number and finally a checksum digit.
For example: 0-14-043531-X
0 = English language
14 = Publisher code
043531 = Item number
X = checksum
We are able to build a list of ISBN publisher codes by picking the most popular publisher name, as it appears in library records, for each code. Using ISBN we can start the process of making publisher a controlled field.
The results: