New book viewer available – your feedback wanted!

BHL developers have incorporated the Internet Archive’s open source book viewing application into the BHL portal, providing a new interface for using BHL’s digital books. Check out last week’s BHL Book of the Week, The Edible Mollusca of Great Britain and Ireland with Recipes for Cooking Them, online through the BHL portal at:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/46647

Now try out the new book viewer:
http://www.archive.org/stream/ediblemolluscaof00love
*This is also available underneath the “Download/About this book” link on each book. Click “Alternate Page Viewer (beta)”.

There are some key pieces of information missing from the book viewer display that are important for BHL users, like the corresponding volumes if the book is a journal/series, lists of names, view of all page numbers & page descriptions, etc. Those have been documented and discussed at:
http://blog.chrisfreeland.com/2008/10/internet-archives-new-book-viewer.html

Look for these improvements to be incorporated into the viewer in the coming months, as the viewer code is open and available for enhancement. For now, the BHL development team would appreciate your feedback on this new viewing option via comments on this post. Let us know what you like, dislike, want larger/smaller, wish would go away and never return, find confusing, find useful…everything – all feedback is useful for improving the display.

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Chris Freeland served as the BHL Technical Director from 2006-2012. He is currently the Director of the Open Libraries program at Internet Archive. In this capacity he works with libraries & publishers to digitize their collections, working towards the Archive’s mission of providing “universal access to all knowledge.”