Tag: Internet Archive

The Incredible, Embeddable Book

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At the end of 2010, the team at the Internet Archive premiered a new BookReader. The new Reader has several nice new features, including a ReadAloud option, improved shareability, and a wider range of navigation options.

The new BookReader can also be used to embed books in websites like this one!

The embeddable BookReader allows for full use of scanned texts on other webpages: you can flip back and forth between pages and move between embedded and full screen views. Going to full screen takes you back to the Internet Archive page for the book, letting you use the ReadAloud and zoom options.

All you have to do to get your own embedded book is click on the “Share This Book” icon (the purple circle) in the top right-hand corner of the Internet Archive display for any text.

Click the purple circle and embed!

Then you can embed your new book anywhere you’d like other people to see it. The Archive’s only caveat is that they haven’t successfully tested the coding on WordPress.com blogs yet.

In creating this post, we found the best technique was to embed the code in the HTML view of our blogging platform and then save the post as a draft; the embedded book then became “live” code and we could continue editing our post as usual. If you want to change the height or width of the book on your website, you can do that easily by editing the pixel numbers in the code (width=’480px’ height=’430px’) generated by the Internet Archive when you click “Share This Book.”

Downloads on the Rise

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As of March 4, 2011, there were 3,326 items from the Francis A. Countway Library digitized and available for download from the Medical Heritage Library on the Internet Archive.

The obvious question is: are they being used?

A staff member decided to find out and discovered that in February alone, there were over 6,000 downloads of items from the Countway. And that was just one month. Overall, there have been more than 38,000 downloads of material from the Countway.

A download, in case you’re curious, is counted when a given user visits the page for a particular book (for example, Alfred Dale Covey’s 1911 The Secrets of Specialists) and actually clicks in to view the page or file. Just visiting the URL for the book doesn’t trip the Internet Archive’s download counter; neither does turning pages within a given book trip the counter.

This means that the material the MHL is busy putting out into the digital world is being sought out and used! We’re delighted that so many scholars are finding our material useful and we’re looking forward to making more items available in the coming months.

As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

Internet Archive Introduces New BookReader

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Books digitized by the Medical Heritage Library can be viewed in the new BookReader.  A number of features have been added, including:

  • Navigation bar that helps show your location in the book and navigate through it. Search results and chapter markers (if available) show up on the navigation bar.
  • New Read Aloud feature reads the book as audio in most browsers.  No special software is needed.
  • Vastly improved full-text search.  Search results are shown on the navigation bar and include a snippet of text near the matched search term.

For more information, see: http://blog.archive.org/2010/12/10/2685/.

For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!