Last fall I set myself to the task of clearing out all the books, magazines, and other stuff that I no longer read. Most of it was given away, but my few rare and/or valuable books went to the Internet Archive.
For example, my copy of the collected editorials of John W Campbell is now available to all. That book only showed up in couple libraries in WorldCat. And then there is my NASA mapbook, which was so rare that NASA’s own history division had never heard of it.
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From time to time I’ve written about the Internet Archive, a non-for-profit organization that is dedicated to digitizing and uploading as much content as they can get their hands on.
I’ve told you about the Braille Playboy they digitized and the 1970′s harddisk that was scanned and placed online. Some time back i also posted on the huge donation they received from the SF Public Library. Today I get to tell you about one of my collection that they’ve uploaded. It’s an old, rare, map book. How rare? I don’t know of any map collections that have one (but I’m hoping this post will find one).
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If you’re in San Francisco, you might consider following in the footsteps of the SF Public Library, who just donated 130 thousand books to the Internet Archive.
Like most public libraries, the SFPL hold a book sale every year as part of their funding efforts. They sell off old and unused books from the collection and they sell any and all books, videos, movies, etc that was donated by library patrons.
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The IA announced Friday night that they had achieved a new milestone. It’s 6 years now that they’ve been scanning and uploading public domain titles and this is the week that they released their 3,ooo,oooth title.
The 3 millionth upload is from the rare book collection of the University of Toronto:
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Jason Scott guest-posted on the Internet Archive blog last night, and he wrote about how he got the IA to scan and archive an old copy of Playboy.
Why do it? Curiosity, for one. When compared to most books scanned by the IA, this is an unusual challenge. I wouldn’t have been sure that the scanning process would work on braille, or that the output would be legible.But apparently I underestimated the expertise of the IA.
I’ve never seen one before and I always wondered what it looked like. I’m not sure that this one came through all that well. The subtle physical differences in the height of the dots aren’t easy to see onscreen.
You can find the copy on archive.org. There’s no centerfold, so anyone who subscribes to the braille edition of Playboy clearly got it for the articles.
via IA
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Today the Internet Archive signed a deal with Kaltera. The IA will be using Kaltera’s software to manage their video libraries. The IA have over 500k video titles, most of which are CC licensed.
It’s not much news, no. But the really neat part about this is that Kaltera’s browser based video player is designed to detect whether your browser supports Flash or HTML5. It will then offer you a compatible video player.
There’s already at least one video with the new player. You can find it here.
image by Carbon Arc
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