Century Past News. Reports of new developments or changes at the Century Past Free Online Library. Free online books, magazines, maps, articles, old photos.
Table of contents
Greetings!
This is the first entry in my new News Blog for Century Past. I hope to use it to point out features of interest at the site, as well as new developments.
Internet Archive Crash Update
If you have visited Century Past lately to look for books, you probably couldn’t open them. Most books on Century Past are actually links to books at Internet Archive (archive.org). Archive.org was attacked by hackers on October 8, and their IT techs have been working ever since to make all collections on the site functional again, and more secure.
As of November 4, I still cannot open the books for loan (i.e. books still in copyright). Two days ago I was able to log on to Internet Archive for the first time since October 8, so they are clearly making progress. The good news is that our magazines appear to be working, as are public domain books (these are mainly books published before 1928).
If you wish to hear a Librivox public domain Audiobook, click “Webamp” rather than the default “Player“, as the latter doesn’t yet work. You can also find all Librivox audiobooks at the Librivox site: https://librivox.org/
Internet Archive provides occasional updates on this issue at their X (Twitter) account – https://x.com/internetarchive
Recent Changes in our Book Pages
Over the past month I’ve been reformatting book pages; deleting most entries for individual books, and adding more ‘topics‘, which are links to search results on Internet Archive. As part of this effort I replaced the two directories for fiction and nonfiction books with a single book directory (in the top menu), with fiction books as a separate category within the new directory.
My guide for these changes has been the BISG (Book Industry Study Group) system of categorizing books. I previously used the Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal systems of classifying books for libraries. The BISG system is used by many book dealers. BISG categories reflect popular demand for books in recent years, while the two library systems were more ambitious efforts to categorize all knowledge.
In Progress – Changing Topic Search Links
I recently began changing all topic links (there are thousands!) to return all search results in Internet Archive, rather than only the books for loan. This results in 2 improvements:
- Public domain (old) books will now be included,
- Media files will be available, although not included.
Clicking on many topics with the new links will get the same results as before. Some topics however, have hundreds of public domain books and/or hundred of media files.
You don’t need to wait for me to make the change in your topic; you can do it yourself. Here’s how:
After you click on a topic and arrive at it’s Internet Archive page, the top of the page may have an entry like this one. Delete “AND collection:(internetarchivebooks)” and click “GO” to search again. The new search may find files other than text files, like this one (in the left column of the Internet Archive page).
Now you can check boxes for movies, audio, images, etc to see those items.
You can also go down to “Year“, click “more” at the bottom, and then check the years of publication that you would like to see.
More groups of interest in the left column (not seen here), are ‘subjects‘, ‘creators‘, and ‘languages‘. All are for the topic (in this case) of “bookbinding”.
If your search of a topic takes you to an Internet Archive page where “AND collection:(internetarchivebooks)” does not appear in the Search field, you will find that the ‘texts‘ box under ‘Media Type’ is probably already checked. To see media files, you need to uncheck ‘texts‘ and check the desired media files.