A slightly more personal note here… it’s been a little over three years since I started working at Open Library and just this past week we hit a milestone of 25,000 emails sent. That’s slightly lower than the number of emails we get because some are just saying “Thank you!” and some we forward to other departments and yes, a few are spam. But the rest–the tech support, the early book returns, the reference questions, the merge requests–have been answered by me and Michelle and Laurel.
There are a lot of neat public domain images in our collections. We’ve highlighted them in the past and continue to encourage people to use, remix and share our content. This week for the #ColorOurCollections event, we’ve pulled out some especially colorable images and made them into PDFs that you can print out and color. We’ve created a few pairs of images we think you’ll like. Here are the images and links to the books where you can find and download even more. If you just want to download a zip file of all eight images, click here.
Next week is the third annual Aaron Swartz Day (2013, 2014), a celebration and Hackathon which takes place at the Internet Archive on November 7th. Please consider joining us. More information about this year’s events can be found here. We have a lot of good news on our end.
The Internet’s Own Boy, the documentary about Aaron Swartz, premieres online and in theaters today. You can watch it on the Internet Archive. From the film’s website
Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday (Jan 11, 2013).
The Open Library wouldn’t exist without him. He wrote the backbone of the system you see today, hired the team that built the first version of the website.
He founded Demand Progress, which launched the campaign against the Internet censorship bills (SOPA/PIPA), coauthored the RSS 1.0 specification, cofounded the online news site Reddit, among many other good things.
His death is a great loss to all of us. May his soul rest in peace.