We are excited to announce that work has begun behind the scenes to rebuild the LibriVox technical infrastructure and implement a new site design and catalog improvements. Thanks to the Mellon Foundation for providing the grant, and to the Internet Archive for administering the project.
A Project Manager and a Developer!
We are thrilled to have a couple of new faces, hired to move this project along: experienced technical project manager, Valerie Bock, and software developer, Jeff Madsen. Jeff and Valerie will work with a team of LV volunteers over the next few months making major improvements to the creaking LibriVox infrastructure, cataloging software, website and user interface.
Please join us in welcoming Val and Jeff to LibriVox! If you see Jeff (jmadsen) or Val (vbock) on the forums, say hi!
From August 2005 to Today
From our humble beginnings in August 2005 (30 audiobooks were completed that year) to today with 5664 completed projects in 32 different languages in our catalog, we are currently well on our way to reaching 6000 cataloged projects by the end of 2012!
Thanks to Everyone Who Has Got Us This Far
We have many people to thank for taking LibriVox from an idea of LibriVox founder, Hugh McGuire, to the largest online publisher of free audiobooks in the last 7 years. These include the core group of volunteers who have built and maintained the existing technical infrastructure, the admins who do all the cataloging, the book coordinators and proof listeners who help produce the books, the Internet Archive for hosting our books, and of course, the over 5000 readers who have donated their recordings to the public domain so that everyone can enjoy them for free.
Looking to the Future
It’s all worked amazingly well, and it’s a lot of fun, but we are looking forward to this much needed overhaul of our systems to ensure that LibriVox will be able to continue to grow so that our volunteers can produce more free audiobooks. Stay tuned for more news and updates as the project progresses.
Congratulations on the grant!! Kudos to you and everyone else who has brought the site so far, and I can’t wait to see what improvements this will lead to.
Hi!
I am ELT teacher in India and and my students, as well as I love this site. How can I be of help to you guys. Will Indian accent be ok for audioboks? Please, let me know.
Welcome! Yes, an Indian accent is perfectly OK for LibriVox. We welcome all accents. :)
I hope the new system will have a search function that can search the full description text. Often I want to look for a book – not by title or author but by words in the full description.
I hope this will be possible.