Author Archives: Jessamyn West

Open Library New Features and Fixes

OpenLibrary team has added pages for 200,000 new modern works and rolled out a brigade of fixes and features.

screen shot of book reader

Prioritized by feedback from openlibrary patrons,

  • Full-text search through all books hosted on the Internet Archive is back online and is faster than ever. You can try the new feature, for example, to see over 115,000 places where works reference Benjamin Franklin’s maxim: “Little strokes fell great oaks”.
  • Updated new Book Reader, which looks great on mobile devices and provides a much clearer and simpler book borrowing experience. Try out the new Book Reader and see for yourself!

There are a few small changes in the BookReader that we think you’ll like specifically. EPUB and PDF loans can be initiated from within an existing BookReader loan. What this means for Open Library users is two pretty cool things you’ve long requested:

  • Users who start loans from the BookReader can borrow either EPUB or PDF formats, and switch formats during the loan period.
  • Users who start loans from the BookReader can return loans early, even EPUBs and PDFs.

 

screen shot showing onscreen areas to download and return books

We hope these changes will delight readers, empower developers, and help the community to make even more quality contributions. The path ahead looks even more promising. With clear direction and exciting redesign concepts in the works, the Open Library team is eager to bring you an Open Library at the cutting edge of the 21st century while giving you access to five centuries’ of texts.

image from old reading textbook

Thank you to Jessamyn West, Brenton Cheng, Mek Karpeles, Giovanni Damiola, Richard Carceres, and the many volunteers in the community.

[from the Open Library blog]

Use the Archive’s resources to help make Wikipedia a better resource

search results with the category finder

So you think you can internet? Help Wikipedia get more citations.

This week is Wikipedia’s 15th birthday and the Wikipedia Library has created the #1lib1ref campaign this week to encourage information professionals and others to add one citation to Wikipedia’s many [citation needed] tags in their articles. If every librarian in the world added one citation, there would be no more [citation needed] tags!

The Internet Archive is a great source for fact checking and our web-native content is easy to cite! Here’s some more information if you’d like to get started.

You can start from our texts collection, use our advanced search or try Open Library’s full text search. You can even add citations to content from our TV News Archive which can search captions or find historical information about the internet using the Wayback Machine. The campaign only goes through the 23rd but please feel free to keep adding citations and increasing the usefulness of Wikipedia by using our primary and secondary source materials.

MY ONLINE MEMORY–Guest Curating the Archive by Jessamyn West

Screen Shot 2015-12-15 at 6.22.45 PMI work at the Internet Archive via the Open Library project but I was a crate digger here long before that. My earliest memories of the Archive are using the Wayback Machine to find old copies of my first web sites (many now lost to 302 redirects) and other memory-holed content. I lived on the West Coast, was fresh out of library school at the University of Washington and used my nascent blog to yammer on about, among other things, all the great free culture stuff on the Web. The old links to my blog still work but the same can’t be said for an incredible amount of content online. The Internet Archive is the online memory for many of us.

I use the internet to make the local global, and vice versa. Here are some other things I love at the Internet Archive.

Maps of Home (and elsewhere)

I can see my house from here.

I can see my house from here.

My home in Vermont is in a bit of an Internet shadow. This is the good news and the bad news. One of the things this means is that if I want to go hiking or exploring, there may not be a ready online resource I can consult for trail and terrain maps. USGS maps are supposedly free but getting access to them used to be complicated if not impossible. Enter the Libre Map Project where a team of people donated money and time and resources to make USGS maps of all fifty states available and searchable from one central location at the Internet Archive. Oh hey look, there’s a review by me from 2009.

Family Histories (mine and others’)

The last Joseph Thomas West listed on this page is my grandfather. Joseph Thomas West IV was my dad. I found this book once before, digging through Massachusetts libraries shortly after college. I had a bunch of its pages stuffed into a folder someplace. It was a joy to find it again.

page from the town history of princeton

On the other side of my family, my great-grandparents were just arriving in the US at the turn of the last century. Accessing the US Census through the Archive means I could track them as they moved from New Jersey to New York and back out to New Jersey. Morris is my grandfather. In the 1910 census he was six years old.

census form with Cohon names on it.

The Archive has a wealth of searchable and downloadable family history books many of which are unavailable elsewhere online.

Ten+ years of Matisyahu shows

Live at Red Rocks

Live at Red Rocks

For Hannukah or any time, Matisyahu’s hazzan-esque lyrical reggae rapping is a tonic for a hectic life. Even better to listen to (and easier to embed) with the newer version of the Archive’s site. I keep this on background when I answer Open Library emails and do other keyboard-intensive work. Thanks to Matisyahu for allowing the Archive to store and distribute his music as part of their extensive Live Music Archive.

Boooooooooks

Mole people!

Mole people!

Steam powered color printing!

Steam powered color printing!

Rolling along modern style

Rolling along modern style

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the BookReader was first released as a way for people to read books online using a book-like interface, it was way ahead of the curve. The online reading experience has improved elsewhere but the Archive is still one of the first places I go to find public domain content (books and magazines) to read, share, answer reference questions, or just use in my presentations. So many libraries in North and South America (or Canada specifically) and Africa have great collections at the Archive from the Biodiversity Heritage Library to New York Public Library to the US National Library of Medicine to 13,000 books in Arabic. Comics! Creepy magazines! Yearbooks! Encyclopedias and dictionaries!

And all of it is available for anyone, for free, whenever they want it.

Happy travels!

Happy travels!

Jessamyn West is a librarian and community technologist. She helps run the Internet Archive’s Open Library project and writes a column for Computers in Libraries magazine. She works with small libraries and businesses in Central Vermont to help them use technology to solve problems.