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RANDOME!


If you've been browsing by subject lately, you may notice that there's now a richer set of interconnections between subjects, and descriptions of subjects, than there used to be. That's because we've started to incorporate data from the Library of Congress' Authorities and Vocabularies website, and also started to develop smarter rules for interpreting and integrating this data. You can read more about it in this blog post.
This is the first in a series of steps we'll be taking over the next few months to improve the scope and intelligence of our collection of free online books. Watch this space for further updates, or follow the Everybody's Libraries blog.

The Online Books Page will be down for parts of the weekend of June 19-20, due to server and power maintenance at the University of Pennsylvania, where this site is hosted. We hope the downtime will be minimal, but it may last as much as 12 hours or more.

(Update: Power has been restored, and the Online Books page should now be fully operational. Let us know if you encounter any problems.)

May 16, 2008

The Online Books Page now implements the Basic Discovery Interfaces (or "Level 1") of the Digital Library Federation's "ILS-Discovery Interface" recommendations. These recommendations, which are being produced by a task force I chaired, call for integrated library systems (ILS's) to allow their data and services to be used in standard ways by all kinds of discovery applications.

While these recommendations are primarily designed for ILS's, they have broader applicability: other digital indexes of information resources, such as The Online Books Page, can implement them too. Using these interfaces, discovery applications can import data and invoke services that let users discover items from their library catalogs and from online digital collections in a uniform way.

The recommendations are still in draft form, but will be officially released shortly. I encourage interested people to find out more, and try implementing or using them. More information on the recommendations, and the Online Books Page implementation, can be found here. Feel free to send me any questions or ideas you have on using them.

John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor

January 1, 2008

Happy New Year, and happy Public Domain Day! Today a year's worth of copyrights enter the public domain in many countries, and I'm also dedicating versions of this site older than 14 years into the public domain, and expanded our Creative Commons licensing of our catalog. See this post at Everybody's Libraries for more details about the new material contributed to the public domain, and this page for more details about the public domain dedication and Creative Commons licenses that now apply to various parts and versions of this site. We'll be converting the copyright notices of this site over time to reflect our new policies.

This is as good a time as any to refer readers of this site to Everybody's Libraries, a new blog I've started about "libraries for everybody, by everybody, shared with everybody, about everything". The posts include items about free online books, as well as other issues. I started the blog at about the same time as I discontinued the Book People mailing list, a mailing list for announcing and discussing free online books and related issues. Mailing list discussions of free online books continue in the successor list Book Futures (moderated by Kent Larsen), and various other lists linked to from the old Book People page.

May 31, 2007

Do you want to see substantially more new listings on The Online Books Page? Do you want to see your suggestions to us appear in the index quickly? Or do you want to collaborate in cataloging new items? You're in luck.

We've been recently making some changes in the "back end" of The Online Books Page to streamline submissions, let our users help us with cataloging, and import individual books and large collections largely automatically. The first visible appearance of these changes is a new suggestion form that permits us to quickly and easily review submissions, and that supports both simple user requests and also detailed cataloging from interested and knowledgeable users. This will be the preferred way of submitting book listings, and we've rewritten our book suggestion page accordingly. For folks who want to provide fully cataloged submissions that we can drop directly into our database, we have a page on form submission tips.

Individual submissions aren't as fast as bulk-loading whole collections will be. (That's being planned too, though.) But the submission form allows individual submissions to be brought in more quickly and at higher volume, particularly for folks who use the form to help out with the cataloging. And they can provide ways of quickly importing the most sought-after titles in the large-scale collections. We invite you to try out the form when there's a book you'd like to see listed here. And let us know if you have any questions or problems.