Open Library gets even more open

Created in 2006 by a team led by Aaron Swartz and Brewster Kahle, Open Library is an Internet Archive project developed to present one web page for every book ever published.  This wiki approach to a catalog encourages new information as well as corrections from the user community.

Recent enhancements allow for even more openness.

Full-text search

A little while back I mentioned Google’s Talk to Books search.  Open Library now also offers a full-text search of its collection of Internet Archive’s more than 4 million books. Simply select text from the pull-down menu to locate text within a title. You can also go directly to Search Inside. This is wonderful for locating quotes and it is also nice to locate combination of terms within texts. And the search extends beyond books other types of documents–patents, yearbooks and open-access research papers.

Here’s what the new full-text search looks like.  (I am not exactly sure how results are organized and there does not appear to be a way to sort them.) For more information, check out the July 14th Open Library Blog post,  Search full-text within 4M+ books,

You can now embed Open Library books

A May 6th Open Library Blog post, Turn your website into a library shared another new feature, the ability to embed Open Library titles.

You may know that you’ve been able to embed books from Google Books on your website by clicking on little link icon above a book. This works for any books with any level of content available. Preview, Google eBooks or Free Google eBooks titles can be embedded.

In Open Library, browse by genre or subject or search to select a title. If you are promoting a title on your website, the embed tool allows you to enable your users to read it with a single depending on availability. You can also choose from among the library of available full-text classic titles and grab embed code of the book itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And, there’s more:

Earlier this year, Open Library also introduced Star Ratings and a Reading Log with privacy settings.

If you have students/patrons who have trouble with print, Internet Archive offers more than a million books free in two types of DAISY or talking books format. Open DAISYs can be read by anyone on a variety of devices. Readers of protected DAISYs must get a key from the Library of Congress NLS program.  Check out this video introduction to DAISY.

Filed under: ebooks, internet archive, OER, Open access, Open Library, search tools