Ben Gimpert is a friend of the Open Library. He and I got together over lunch a few months ago to talk about big data, statistical natural language processing, and extracting meaning from Open Library programmatically. His efforts are beginning to bear some really interesting fruit, and while we work out how we might be able to present it online, we thought you might be interested to hear what he’s been up to…
Tag Archives: features
Thumbnail View in BookReader!
We’re pleased to introduce a new thumbnail view for the Internet Archive BookReader. The thumbnail view gives you a quick visual impression of a book by seeing thumbnails of many pages at once. It’s a great way to quickly scan through a book.
Here’s how it looks for a book about the painter Goya:
The thumbnail view also makes it easy to pick out particular pages of interest, for example if you were trying to find the Burrowing Owl in Bird life in an Arctic Spring. Hint: here’s what he looks like:
You might also try looking at Old English colour prints or some of the other books about color prints.
This feature was submitted by Stephanie Collett of the California Digital Library via our BookReader GitHub account. It’s great to have this feature come in from the open source community building around the BookReader!
Announcing the Open Library redesign
Screenshot on Flickr – CC Attribution
Hooray! And yay! We’re very excited to announce the “soft launch” of our brand new Open Library site! This is version 1 of a reconstructed Open Library, and we’re going to keep it “soft” at a special URL until we’re sure it’s stable enough to make the final transition to openlibrary.org. We’re hoping that will happen soon.
As we mentioned in two previous blog posts [1][2], the main features of the new design are:
Internet Archive's BookReader out in the wild
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!
New Bits!
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!