Book Introduction:
oday, The Online Books Page increases its repertoire of titles twentyfold, with our new extended shelves. The extended shelves consist of book information downloaded in bulk from selected online book projects, adapted by various automated means for The Online Books Page. Listings from the extended shelves are displayed with an [X-Info] icon; listings that we've reviewed and edited ourselves (the "curated collection"), which include all of our pre-existing listings, are displayed with the [Info] icon. Initially, the extended shelves include all of the public domain and other fully readable online books provided by Hathi Trust that we don't already list. We hope to include additional books from other collections in the future. Combined with our existing listings, our new extended-shelves data lets users browse and search over 800,000 books by subject, author, title, and Library of Congress call number. In all, you can now find more than 1 million freely readable online volumes via this site. (We prefer to count multi-volume works once, however.) Book records on the extended shelves have not been reviewed by the editor, and might not be fully detailed, or fully consistent with other records on this site. Many of the searching and browsing results will show curated records before records from the extended shelves. Some search and browse pages will not show results from the extended shelves until you ask for them. (This is done both to avoid overwhelming the user with results, and in some cases to avoid overwhelming the server software. As we now have nearly a million records in a database designed for tens of thousands, we'd like to avoid overtaxing the system unnecessarily.) If you want to see more results, look for an "include extended shelves" link near the top of the page to expand the results you see. (Once you've done that, you can select a similar "exclude extended shelves" link in mahy cases if you want to go back to the shorter result sets from the curated collection.) Books in the extended shelves can be added to the curated collection on request. If you select the [X-Info] icon next to a book listing on the extended shelves, the resulting book information page will include a link for requesting curation of the title. Selecting that link will bring you to our book suggestion form, with the book's cataloging information already filled in. You can correct or add to the information if you like, and then press the "Submit this suggestion" button at the bottom of the form to submit the book for consideration. We'll review the book's information and copyright status, and then add the record to our curated collection if and when it satisfies us. That will give the book a stable, linkable information page here, and make it show up more prominently in browsing and search results. On the Everybody's Libraries blog, you can read more about how and why we've added these records to our listings. We hope you find the new listings useful, and would love to hear from you about them, and about books from the extended shelves you'd like us to curate. John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
