When: Wednesday, March 3, 2010, 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Where: Gray Area Foundation for the Arts @ 55 Taylor Street, San Francisco, CA 94102 (Map)
The Internet Archive is holding a salon to discuss the resources available at the Internet Archive, how artists and creative people can access and contribute to the Archive, or to our Open Library and BookServer projects. The salon will be hosted by Gray Area Foundation For The Arts (GAFFTA), here in San Francisco.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we’ve been working hard on reconstructing Open Library, and it’s getting to that exciting stage when the redesign is starting to feel alive, and full of real data.
One thing we’re producing is a new page about a certain subject that shows a list of all the Works about that subject, authors that write about it, publishers that publish books in that area, and a graph that shows the publishing history of that subject – all generated from bibliographic data and our shiny new search!
It’s been some months since we’ve updated you about what the Open Library is up to. Sorry about that. Thought it might be nice to produce a novella/brain dump to let you know where we’re at.
The short answer is: all sorts of things! I’ve been leading the project now for about 6 months, and have finally settled down enough to tell you what we’re up to. We’d love to hear what you think of our ideas perhaps in the comments of this post, or on our general discussion mailing list.
The Open Library project began in February of 2007, and launched in November that year, so it’s approaching 3 years old. During that time, we’ve amassed one of the biggest virtual library catalogs online, at some 23 million edition entries and some 6 million or so author records. We also have a ton of book covers. Our catalog is entirely open and free to use. You can download everything if you wish, or use our API to either link to our records, or to display Open Library data on your website.
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!
We’re planning for a scheduled downtime on Wednesday, October 28 for hardware upgrade of Open Library servers. Open Library will be unavailable for 2 hours during 7:00 AM PST – 9:00 AM PST.
We’ll post here when the site’s back online.
Update at 8:36am: And we’re back!