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.

Who's counting?

The image above shows what I look at every day, and shows why I am feeling guilty on this beautiful Saturday in the New York area. The program is called StatCounter, and it is nirvana for a usage junkie. I can see how many visitors I have, what they searched to get here, which page referred them and how long they stayed around. I'd spent hundreds of dollars in 2000 for a usage program that didn't give data as good as this one does for free. The reason I feel guilty is this - I have regulars. People who drop in from California, Georgia, Ireland, England and even Brazil to see what I've had to say lately. I can tell because they always show "No referring link." This is the greatest compliment a blogger could possibly get, and I have been silent for weeks now. So, I will drink a toast to these people and promise that I will write something at least every other week from now on.

This week saw at least 2 milestones at my library. The VERSO graphic user interface to electronic reference books has gone live on our web page. Also, on Wednesday night, we learned that Innovative Interfaces had activated our Webpac Pro account. I got up Thursday morning to try it out, typing in the keyword search 'Mark Twain." Here is what I saw:

To put it mildly , I was startled. Search results in browse screens now include our book covers, and cluster the most relevant results at the top. We now get 50 records at a time instead of 12.

People trying this for the first time have a standard response - "Wow!"

If the internet gets any more interesting, I might be tempted to unplug my home computer and go back to the land. This summer I discovered the trick to adding pictures to Wikipedia. At various times in the past, I've had unflattering things to say about Wikipedia, but I am mellowing a bit. A year ago a Wikipedia editor invited me to add photos to the Nashville pages, but the procedures for doing it were, to put it mildly, baffling. Now they have greatly simplified it. I signed up for an account in their offshoot Wikipedia Commons and began uploading photos. What I tried to do was add photos if there were people or places that didn't have them and I had something to contribute. You can see my photos now in the Wiki articles about Cahirciveen, Castlegregory, Fenit and the author pages for Michael Blake and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Thanks to a few very patient souls, I found out that I needed to send the original resolution photos rather than things that had been trimmed down to go into my Pbase galleries.

After dozens of these contributions I was starting to run out of Wiki articles that needed me, and I found out that Google is now adding photos to Google Earth. This is so new that very scenic places like Longwood Gardens and Old Westbury Gardens still have no attached photos, so I'll be busy adding to Google Earth for some time to come. You think it would be easy to find out how to do this - just make a Google Search "Adding photos to Google Earth." It took me quite a while, so I'll save my faithful readers the trouble. Sign up for a free account at Panoramio.com, upload pictures, and you are given an intuitive map that allows you to add things directly into Google Earth. My first few aren't up yet because they have to be okayed by an editor, which is supposed to take about a week.

So this ends a rather rambling post. See you all again in two weeks or less!