Category Archives: Data

Snowflakes

I just stumbled on a beautiful, recently-scanned book about snowflakes, published in 1863. Apart from its gorgeous illustrations, the author’s opinions about snowflakes are also fascinating.

By the way, the other day we added a little link on any Internet Archive pages that are echoed in Open Library that sends you straight to our open, editable record for that item, so, if you’re surfing around the Archive’s Texts collection and you find a book we have a record for, you can just jump across and – if you’re so inclined – help to flesh out the information we have about it.

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API with RDF/XML output available

It is now possible to access Open Library book metadata in an  RDF/XML format. The access is through the RESTful API. For an example, view:

http://openlibrary.org/b/OL6807502M.rdf

The returned RDF/XML relies heavily on Dublin Core metadata terms, and uses some elements from bibliontology and the registered RDA schemas. Although soundly based on RDF, the output can be used like any XML and presents (most of) the Open Library metadata in the easily understood Dublin Core terms.

It has been suggested that this format include links to cover images, where available. It is also on our list to add tables of contents to the output. Other suggestions are very welcome — add them here, or send them to the ol-tech discussion list.

We’d love to hear about the uses you make of this API, and anything we can do to help you get more out of the Open Library.

Mathematics in book titles

I’ve just found three books by J. Peter May with descriptions of mathematics notation in the title:

  1. E [sign for infinity] ring spaces and E [sign for infinity] ring spectra
  2. [The mathematical expression for infinite loop] ring spaces and [The mathematical expression for infinite loop] ring spectra
  3. E [infinity subscript] ring spaces and E [infinity subscript] ring spectra

It is difficult to write software that can tell these titles are the same, yet they are. The Open Library book merging code has failed to recognize these are all the same book, and so we have three records in the database, where there should be one.

I wonder how often descriptions of mathematical notation appear in bibliographic records; this is the first time I’ve seen it.
https://blog.openlibrary.org/category/data/page/2/
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