[WEB4LIB] Re: New search engine

[Lars Aronsson]

Michael.Yunkin at ccmail.nevada.edu wrote:
> I don't particularly like the thumbnails; on my screen they appear way too

Speaking of thumbnails, the Million Book and Canadian Libraries
projects at the Internet Archive have invented a new way to iconize
scanned books.  They have taken thumbnail images of the first 30 pages
of each book and made them into an animated GIF image.  

For an example, see the "Lyrics from the song-books of the Elizabethan
Age" (1887),  http://www.archive.org/details/lyricselizaage00bulluoft

In this case, the 100 x 161 pixel animated GIF is 440 kbytes, which
should be a real pain for modem users (not that the Internet Archive
would care).  Perhaps this could be improved by reducing the colors or
number of pages included.

I personally hope they don't have a patent for this, as I wish to 
reuse the concept.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se