Real page turners

A week or so ago, I got an email from a former student who sent a link about the Open Library - (http://www.openlibrary.org)/ a new project to display ebooks in a way that really emulated the experience of holding a book in your hand and turning the pages. They only have a handful of 19th century titles, but they have big plans. It's interesting to note that the guiding manager behind this, Aron Swartz, is a young man who helped to invent RSS. There are only a few sample titles available, but they are a delight to see. The Open Library has developed a system to click on the pages and they will appear to "turn."



A few days later, a colleague mailed me a link to an article about the British Library's online program. They have taken the cream of their treasures and generated animated book access to them. When you go to their site at http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html , you have a choice that is a book lover's dream. Leonardo's notebooks, the original Alice in Wonderland in Lewis Carroll's hand. The animation is the most realistic yet - you move the hand to the edge of the page and move the page over. I found this sometimes hard to do, and you do have the less exciting option of pushing the arrow key below. In terms of the technology and the content, this is a must-see. One particularly neat feature is the magnifying glass - very handy for atlases.


I know now that I will need to change the way we do things in our digitization program. In the past, I had not bothered saving tifs of the scanned pages once the text had been converted to html. Now I know that we will want page images on every title we do, so I will start shopping for a massive hard drive to save all of the images.