Tag Archives: Library

Reading Desk 2.0

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We’re busily preparing for tomorrow and Friday’s Books in Browsers conference here at the Internet Archive. In terms of the Open Library, the meeting will herald the release of a flurry of new features, including our new Full Text search and a redesign of the Internet Archive BookReader. (More on those later.)

It just so happens that when we moved into our new home — formerly a Christian Science Church — we inherited a bunch of furniture, including some classic old reading desks that came out of the church’s reading room. We’ve given them an update, and thanks to Raj, you can see Reading Desk 2.0:

Reading Desk 2.0, built by Jermaine, soon to be running the new IA touch bookreader!
Reading Desk 2.0, built by Jermaine, soon to be running the new IA touch bookreader!

Reading Desk 2.0 #bib10
Reading Desk 2.0, June, Brewster, Jermaine, Chris

Internet Archive Reading Desk #bib10
Brewster at the Desk

Woo!

Open Library Ore: A MySQL data dump is available

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A while back, Ben Gimpert - click to visit Ben's websiteBen Gimpert wrote a guest post for us called Open Library Ore, explaining how he had begun to hack on the massive full text corpus on the Internet Archive, practising various Natural Language Processing techniques to begin to teach machines to glean topics of books by sheer letter crunching. Turns out the elements in the ore are beginning to emerge, particularly in the form of a dataset available for download under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 CC license… Please, if you know SQL, why not download the dataset and see what you can find out? We’d love to hear any discoveries you make, perhaps in the comments?

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Library Advertainment

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I hope you’ve seen the hilarious Old Spice ads popping up. Really clever actually, to write and film proper responses to people’s tweets.

On Twitter, wawoodworth wrote “ATTN LIBRARIAN TWEEPS: Need help getting @oldspice guy to say a few words regarding libraries. RT plz. Thanks.”

Small Moves: Open Library Integrates Digital Lending

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Today, the Internet Archive is pleased to announce 2 new borrowing options through Open Library:

  1. Borrowing ebooks through OverDrive – an ebook through your local library
    We have worked with the team at OverDrive to import about 70,000 new ebook editions into Open Library. All loans via OverDrive are managed through the OverDrive system. Once you click on borrow for these titles, you’ll need to tell OverDrive where you are so it can find your local library.

    Want to try a search through the OverDrive titles?

  2. Borrowing Scanned Books through participating libraries – an ebook to you, anywhere in the world
    Three long-time Internet Archive library partners are now offering scanned books from their collections for loan through Open Library. Boston Public Library, the Biblioteca Ludwig von Mises at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala, the Marine Biological Laboratory in Wood’s Hole as well as the Internet Archive itself are proud to make around 200 titles available for loan as ebooks through Open Library.

    You’ll need to download the free Adobe® Digital Editions software to manage borrowing scanned books.

  3. Borrowing Physical Books through WorldCat– from your local library
    Since Open Library was launched back in 2007, we’ve added links wherever possible into the WorldCat catalog, which you can search using your location to find a copy of the book near you.

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