Excitement at Internet Archive!
Internet Archive has recently rolled out a major redesign of their website. I don’t love everything about the design (its much less information dense, so requires more navigation and is less easy to browse), but one thing is AWESOME: they now provide direct download of the page image files!
Remember that work around I came up with to harvest the page images out of their online reader? You don’t have to do that any more. Just click on the download button, and most items will offer raw and edited scans images (JP2) in addition to the usual EPUB, PDF, and other access derivatives. They actually expose all files related to an item if you click “See All Files”, including the metadata in a bunch of formats.
Check out Aladore 1915 for an example: https://archive.org/details/aladorehen00newbrich
Wow! I am seriously impressed and excited! I mentioned the issue of only providing limited access versions in previous posts, so its great to see the huge collection at Internet Archive take this massive leap forward in enabling users and re-use.
p.s. on a related note, just as I cropped out the illustrations from Aladore and provide them in nicely edited versions here for re-use, Internet Archive initiated a project about a year ago to mine the wealth of images out of their digitized books. They started posting images on their Flickr website in July 2014, https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages
Today they have 2,878,891 images posted! That’s a lot to browse through… they haven’t gotten to Aladore yet, so you will still have to visit here!
Digital Aladore 