Trails and tours in library online environments

Posted on March 6, 2026 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Below is the text of the lightning talk I gave at Code4Lib 2026 earlier this week, on March 3. The conference venue where I delivered it is located at 1 Dock Street in Old City Philadelphia. Links below go to websites with images similar, but not always identical, to the ones I showed during the talk, as well as to some additional sites giving more context.

If you have a chance, it’s worth walking a few blocks from here to 6th and Market Street, where you can find a reconstructed frame of the President’s House, the home of George Washington during his presidency when Philadelphia was the capital of the US.

An exhibit went up there some years ago, telling the story of the nine people in his household who were enslaved there. Not long ago, the Trump administration ordered the exhibit be removed. You can see here one of the spaces where its panels were taken down.

Here’s one of those panels, putting the story of Washington’s slaves in the context of where they lived, and the chronology of their bondage and freedom.

A judge recently ordered that the exhibit be restored. The court battle is ongoing, and the National Park Service has put back some of the panels. while others are still missing.  In some of the gaps the public have put up their own signs (some of which you can see in this picture), testifying to what’s been suppressed. If you go there, you might even find someone acting as an unofficial tour guide, telling visitors stories similar to the ones that used to be on the official signs.

Now, we know what those signs said. The folks at the Data Rescue project collected photos of them before they came down, and you can view them online.   But the importance of the exhibit is not just what it says, but where it says it.   It’s important that it’s embedded in a particular place, so that people who come visit what’s sometimes called the cradle of liberty also find out that there’s a story about the people deprived of liberty here, and about how they won their freedom.

While we’re at Code4lib, we’re also embedded in a rich environment filled with history and culture.  Just on your walk from here to the President’s House you might pass by the Museum of the American Revolution, the Science History Institute, the American Philosophical Society, the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, and of course, the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. There’s all kinds of trails of knowledge you can follow, and it’s even better when you have a guide to those trails.

So what do I mean by a trail? A trail is a designated, visible path designed to help its users appreciate and understand the environment it goes through.  You may have hiked some sometimes, and you may have gone on some more explicitly interpretive trails, like the Freedom Trail in Boston.

Our libraries are also rich environments of history and culture.  And we provide ways for users to search them, but do we provide trails for them?

Well, we kind of do.  We have exhibits, like this one from the Library Company of Philadelphia, providing a guided path through a collection of 19th century works on mental illness. People who teach courses like this one at at Yale create instructional trails in their syllabus reading lists. And books that our scholars and authors write, like this one on the history of the civil rights movement, show an implicit trail of events they cover in their tables of contents.

But while these trails all refer to resources in our libraries, they’re not embedded in libraries in the same way as the exhibits and trails I’ve shown in Philadelphia and Boston. But they could be. 

You can think of it as an extension of browsing.  Last time Code4lib was here in Philly, I showed how a catalog I maintain lets you browse subjects using relationships in the Library of Congress Subject Headings, so you can explore various related topics around, say, who can start a war. More recently, I’ve added features for finding out more about people and their relationships, using linked data from places like id.loc.gov and Wikidata.

But we don’t have to stop with what’s in authority files, or in generic library descriptions. Maybe in the future, when you’re visiting Martha Washington’s page, you’ll find a trail that goes through it, like a trail telling the story of Ona Judge, one of the African Americans who Martha claimed ownership over, and who escaped from the house at 6th and Market here in Philadelphia, and stayed free the rest of her life.

What will that trail telling her story look like? I’m not quite sure, but I have some ideas that I’m hoping to try implementing, not so that I can tell the story, but that I can represent the story from others who can tell it better than I can.  And so that people visiting my site can find and follow that story, with all of its richness, just as they once could when they visited the President’s House in Philadelphia, and as I hope they soon can do here again.

If this interests you, I’d love to talk more with you.





Posted in censorship, citizen librarians, discovery, libraries, online books, people, preservation, teaching | Tagged | 2 Comments

How to help people find good reading on The Online Books Page (Some dos and don’ts)

Posted on February 13, 2026 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The catalog of free online books and serials at The Online Books Page continues to grow and improve every week. You can watch our new books listings, or subscribe to our RSS feed, to see what books we’ve newly cataloged on nearly every business day. There’s also a lot more development of the collection that you don’t see there. Right now, for instance, we’re adding information about newly available issues of many of the serials we already list, after 1930 copyrights expired at the start of January. (We’ve also updated information on what copyright renewals for them are still in effect, and updated our guides on determining whether books or serials are in the public domain.). And throughout the year, we fix links that break, import records from various other online book projects into our extended shelves, and improve our metadata to make it easier for readers to discover and get to things they want to read online.

That’s a lot for one editor (with a number of other job responsibilities) to take care of. Much of what makes it possible for me to do it is what I hear from readers all over the world. They tell me what books and serials they’re particularly interested in reading or consulting, and I use what I’ve been told to add works I might not have otherwise considered, and provide better information about them. I find out what subjects, authors, and serials a broad and diverse community of readers wants to read more of. I also find out about things I might have to fix in my catalog, as links go bad, better information surfaces about what I list, and sites go down or withdraw free access to work they once provided.

So I appreciate hearing from readers to keep the catalog fresh and useful. Long ago, though, it became clear that I could never keep up with all the suggestions people sent me by email. I can reasonably keep up with them, though, when readers use the forms I’ve set up for suggestions and corrections, and follow some basic etiquette when they do so. Here’s how to do that:

To suggest a new listing, use our suggestion form. If you haven’t recently read them, look at the instructions for making suggestions and the tips on filling out the form that are linked at the top of the form. That will tell you, among other things, what qualifies for listing on the site and what does not, and how to best ensure a useful and timely new listing.

You should include only one book (or serial) in each suggestion. If it’s a multi-volume work, or you know of multiple sites that have it, you can include extra URLs for them in the “Anything else we should know about this suggestion?” comment box near the bottom of the form.

If you want to hear from us that we’ve listed your book (or get any other response, whether it’s an answer to a question you asked in the comment box, or a note explaining why we declined to list something you suggested), put your email address (and if you like, your name) in the designated space in the form. There’s also a box you can check so these will automatically be filled in for you if you make another suggestion later (assuming your browser allows cookies from our site).

If you find a book in our extended shelves (which has data automatically imported from other sites), and would like it “promoted” to the “curated” collection (whose listings appear more prominently on our site, and whose catalog records we’ve checked and often improved), you can click on the “request that we add this book” link on its catalog page. That will take you to our suggestion form, with some of the fields already filled out based on the automatically imported record. Make any changes or additions you see fit, and then push the “Submit this suggestion” button at the bottom of the form. Please only do this for books you’re actually interested in reading or consulting. We know the automatically imported data on the extended shelves can be messy, but there are well over 3 million records in our extended shelves, and rather than spend endless time cleaning them all up manually, we’d rather spend our time listing and improving listings for books that we know our readers want to find.

For similar reasons, unless you have a particular interest in specific editions of a popular work, it generally isn’t a good use of time to exhaustively suggest all of the different editions of that work. (Those can run into the dozens or even hundreds, in some cases.) Instead, focus on the editions that you find most useful. (That will also help other readers find the most useful editions of that work, without having to sort through lots of chaff, not knowing which of many alternatives to choose.)

To have us fix something wrong in a listing, use the “report a bad link” link to take you to our bad links reporting form. If you select this from a book’s catalog page, some of the boxes in the form will be pre-filled to let us know which book you found the problem with. If you select it from the bottom of the page elsewhere on the site, you may need to fill in details on which listing you found the bad link on. In either case, it can be useful to fill in the “What happened when you tried the link?” box (even it’s just to say something like “I got a blank page”), so we can better troubleshoot the problem. You can also report other problems with the listing, such as bad metadata, if it’s in our curated collection. (Don’t bother doing that for the automated listings in our extended shelves, unless it’s a book you’re interested in yourself. In that case, though, it’s better to use the suggestion form, often reachable via a “suggest we add this book” link.)

You can also use the “what happened?” contact box to tell us if the site the book is on seems to have disappeared, reorganized, or been taken over by someone else. When we get a bad link report like that, we’ll often check out other listings that link to the same site, and deal with all of them as needed, without you needing to individually report every listing

If the forms aren’t working for you, you can email us instead at the address given on our site. The forms generally work for most people, but there are times when they might be unavailable. (The usual reason for that these days is that the site occasionally gets over-burdened by automated programs aggressively crawling our site and other cultural heritage sites.) If you need to email us because a form isn’t working, we’ll be able to pick out your email for attention if you include on your subject line the code word currently mentioned on our page of how to suggest works.)

Give us your email address if you’re suggesting more than a few works before we get around to listing them. We support the right to read anonymously (and the accompanying right to anonymously ask for what you want to read). We also understand that sometimes a reader might have good reason to suggest a moderately long list of works, such as from a thematic reading list or bibliography. But anonymity and bulk requests don’t go together well.

If you leave your email address when you submit a sizable list of suggestions, we can work out good ways to manage their inclusion, and let you know if issues come up with the list, or if you need to ease off or use a different approach. But if you submit a lot of works anonymously, there’s no way for us to give you feedback, or even to know if there’s a real person who actually cares about all the books requested, and not just mechanically going through a list without particular interest or thought about its contents. Which leads to our last request:

Do not use “AI”, “agents”, chatbots, or other automated systems to fill out our forms or otherwise communicate with us. Heavily promoted technology now makes it possible for computers to automatically generate lots of text that appears useful, and to automatically submit it into forms like the ones we use for The Online Books Page. But just because computer code can now quickly request dozens, or hundreds, of books that match patterns found when crawling the Internet, it doesn’t mean those books are of much interest to any human using my site at the moment. If you’re a person who wants to read a book that is or could be online, you should be to be able to request it from us, and get a quick and useful response. But it’s hard to do that when our attention gets pulled away from interested readers by the demands generated by automated systems, or by others impersonally claiming disproportionate shares of personal attention.

We do have ways of dealing with abusive bulk and automated requests, as we have for years with spam of all sorts. I recently added added a warning to our request form that “anonymous bulk submissions may be deferred or discarded partially or entirely, at the editor’s discretion”. We will be doing more of that in the future as long as such submissions are common, and we will take other steps that prove necessary to counter abuse and thoughtless demands on people’s time.

We value our readers, and want to hear from you, personally. I love that people all over the world use The Online Books to find reading that informs, enlightens, and pleases them. I’m thankful that so many of you want to share that reading with others, and help improve the collection we offer here. As I’ve said earlier, I intend to offer works and services “created with care by people, processed with care by code”. I’d love to hear about works that you particularly care about, so we can offer them to others. Whether you’re suggesting a book or serial we should add, prompting us to fix a problem, or simply appreciating what you’ve found here, I hope you’ll reach out to us, or to the people who create the books and maintain the sites that we link to. I hope what I’ve written here encourages you to do that, and help you to be heard in return.

Posted in citizen librarians, discovery, metadata, online books, open access, people, privacy, reading, sharing | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Public Domain Day 2026: Celebrating human creativity and sharing

Posted on January 1, 2026 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I’m glad we’ve reached a new Public Domain Day, and that the works I’ve been featuring in my #PublicDomainDayCountdown, and many more, are now free to copy and reuse. I’ve been posting about works joining the public domain in the United States, which include sound recordings published in 1925, and other works published in 1930 that had maintained their copyrights. (Numerous works from 1930, and later, that had to renew their copyrights, and did not, were already in the public domain, though many of the best-known works did renew copyrights as required.) This is the eighth straight year Americans have seen a year’s worth of works join the public domain, after a 20-year freeze following a 1998 copyright extension.

I intend my countdown not just to celebrate the works joining the public domain, but also to celebrate what people have done with those works. In some posts, I note later creations based on those works. In nearly all my posts, I link to things that people have written about those works. Like the works themselves, those responses may have flaws or quirks, but I value them as human reactions to human creations. Whether they’re reviews, personal blog posts, professionally written essays, scholarly analyses, or Wikipedia articles, they’re created by people who encountered an interesting work and cared about it enough to craft a response to it and share it with the world. Those shared responses in turn pique my interest in the writers and the works.

It wasn’t always easy for me to find such responses online. Sometimes I’d go searching for responses to a promising-sounding work, and only find sales listings on e-commerce sites, social media posts not easily linkable or displayable without logging into a commercial platform, paywalled articles that many of my readers can’t view, or generic-sounding pages that read like they were generated by a large language model or a content farm, but not by anyone who I could clearly tell cared about or even read the work in question. Some works I initially hoped to feature got left off my countdown, replaced by other works where I could more readily link to an interesting response.

The people publishing the responses I link to are often swimming against a strong current online. Many online writing systems– including the one I’ve been writing these posts on— are now urging their users to “improve” their posts by letting “AI” write them. Some writers may be tempted to allow it, when facing an impending deadline or writer’s block or anxiety, even when the costs can include muffling one’s own voice, signing onto falsehoods confidently stated by a stochastic text generator, or abusively exploiting existing content and services. Other writers may feel pushed to put their work behind paywalls or other access controls that makes them less likely to be plagiarized or aggressively crawled by those same “AI” systems. And most writers, myself included, find it easy to dash off a quick short take on a social media platform, be quickly gratified by some “like”s, and then have it forgotten. It’s harder to take the time to craft something longer or more thought-out that will be readable for years, and that might take much longer for us to hear appreciated. The easy alternatives can discourage people from devoting their time to better, more lasting creations.

As I’ve noted before, both copyright and the public domain serve important purposes in encouraging the creation, dissemination, sharing, and reuse of literature and art. One reason I write my public domain posts is to promote a better balance between them, particularly in encouraging shorter copyright lengths to benefit both original creators and the public. Similarly, as I’ve noted in another recent post, I value both human creation and automated processes, but I increasingly see a need to improve the balance between those as well, especially as some corporations aggressively push “generative AI”. While I appreciate many ways in which automation can help us create and manage our work, I treasure the humanity that people thoughtfully put into the creation of literature and art of all kinds, and the human responses that those creations elicit.

Today I’m thankful for all of the people, most no longer with us, who made the works that are joining the public domain today. I’m thankful for the new opportunities we have to share and build on those works now that they’re public domain. I’m thankful to all the people who have responded to those works, whether as brief reactions or as new works as ambitious as the works they respond to. And I hope you’ll keeping making and sharing those responses with the world when you can. I look forward to reading them, and perhaps linking to them in future posts.

Posted in publicdomain | Tagged | 7 Comments

“Last…” will be first

Posted on December 31, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Ninety-five (or 100) years is a very long time for copyrights to last. But Olaf Stapledon saw a much longer future for us in Last and First Men (reviewed here and here). His book tells a story of successive human species over the next 2 billion years.

Stapledon died in 1950, and his work is already public domain most places outside the US. Tomorrow a copy in Australia will be among the first books to be relisted in my new books listing, finally free for all. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

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Soon graduating into the public domain

Posted on December 30, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Yale’s 1905 commencement ceremonies included a honorary doctorate for British composer Edward Elgar, and a portion of his first “Pomp and Circumstance” march. It’s been a staple of graduation processions ever since. The full suite of five marches that Elgar finished takes about 30 minutes to play, but took nearly three decades to complete. The first march has long been in the US public domain; the last, published in 1930, joins it there in two days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

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Two great blues musicians, and 2000 more records

Posted on December 29, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

David Seubert writes that more than 2500 records from 1925 digitized by the UC Santa Barbara Library will soon be freely downloadable there. A full listing of these recordings is online (though note that recordings made in 1925 but not released that year won’t be public domain yet).

A highlight of the collection is “St. Louis Blues”, sung by Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong on cornet. One of the top selling records of 1925, it will be public domain in 3 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

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Marlene Dietrich comes to America

Posted on December 28, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Marlene Dietrich enjoyed success on stage and screen in 1920s Berlin, but became an international star in 1930. That year she came to the United States to star in Morocco alongside Gary Cooper. Her performance was nominated for an Academy Award. So was the direction by Josef von Sternberg, who also directed her in The Blue Angel and several other films. Morocco was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1992, and will be inducted into the public domain in 4 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

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Banned in Texas

Posted on December 27, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Struggle over academic freedom in Texas state universities has a long history. Today it’s often over race and gender; in the 1940s, it was over things like John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy. When the University of Texas Board of Regents banned it from classrooms, university president Homer Price Rainey objected to their interference. After they fired him, thousands protested on campus. The first part of the USA trilogy, The 42nd Parallel, joins the public domain in 5 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

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In the public domain soon, in libraries now

Posted on December 26, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The Penn Libraries, where I work, has first editions of many of the works featured in my #PublicDomainDayCountdown . From today through Public Domain Day, the Libraries social media will feature photos of some distinctive books from 1930.

One of featured photos, also shown here, is of the 1930 edition of W. H. Auden‘s Poems, which made his work known to readers worldwide. Glynn Young writes about the “brilliant collection” of 30 poems, and one verse drama, joining the public domain in 6 days.

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O come, let all 4,850 of us adore him

Posted on December 25, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

In 1925 the Associated Glee Clubs of America put on a concert like no other. 15 choral groups, with over 850 singers in all, came together in New York’s Metropolitan Opera House to sing a program broadcast on radio across America. Portions were electrically recorded, including “Adeste Fideles”, where the audience of 4000 joined in the carol. Lloyd Winstead writes about the record, which is now in the National Recording Registry, and joins the public domain in 7 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

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