Tag Archives: books

Mathematics in book titles

I’ve just found three books by J. Peter May with descriptions of mathematics notation in the title:

  1. E [sign for infinity] ring spaces and E [sign for infinity] ring spectra
  2. [The mathematical expression for infinite loop] ring spaces and [The mathematical expression for infinite loop] ring spectra
  3. E [infinity subscript] ring spaces and E [infinity subscript] ring spectra

It is difficult to write software that can tell these titles are the same, yet they are. The Open Library book merging code has failed to recognize these are all the same book, and so we have three records in the database, where there should be one.

I wonder how often descriptions of mathematical notation appear in bibliographic records; this is the first time I’ve seen it.

OLPC Bookreader Demonstration

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.

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