Back in 2020, we started the tradition of hosting an annual Community Celebration to honor the efforts of volunteers across the globe who help make the Open Library project possible. Tomorrow, Tuesday, October 31st at 9am Pacific, we warmly invite the public to join us in a small gathering to celebrate the hardworking humans who keep the website going, see demonstrations of their accomplishments, and get a glimpse into our direction for 2024 — Halloween Edition! Join us tomorrow: Oct 31, 2023 9 AM, PDT (90 minutes) Online: https://zoom.us/j/369477551 During this online celebration, you ..read more

Earlier this year, the Internet Archive’s Open Library conducted a brief survey to learn more about patrons’ experiences and preferences when borrowing and reading books. As promised, we’ve anonymized the results and are sharing them with you! We invite you to watch the presentation or view the slides: Purpose The purpose of this survey was to better understand: If, how, & why Open Library patrons download books How patron reading preferences align with our offerings Survey Setup For one week, starting on Tuesday 2022-02-07, OpenLibrary.org patrons were invited to participate in a brief ..read more

Hello, I am Jayden Teoh, a student from Singapore, and this year I participated as a 2023 Google Summer of Code contributor with the Internet Archive’s Open Library project to improve the site’s performance and supercharge subject pages. If you are an Open Library patron, you have likely encountered times where certain pages seem to take and eternity to load. The Open Library team understands the importance of a smooth browsing experience and empathizes with how degraded site performance affects patrons. This is why we prioritized site performance as a key focus for our 2023 GSoC roadmap. As s ..read more

Hello, I’m Nick Norman – I volunteer as the Lead Communications Fellow at the Internet Archive’s Open Library. The Open Library provides readers with free, digital access to millions of library books, but we can only help readers who know we exist. My mission is to cultivate an inclusive communications program that helps even the most remote readers discover and access our free services, learn about new features, and stay informed about the latest library news. In the service of achieving this goal, I’ve spent the past several months designing a strategic communications plan for OpenLibrary.o ..read more

by Nick Norman & Mek In an ongoing series, the Internet Archive hosts renowned authors of the digital humanities and beyond for virtual book talks that are free and open to the public. Graphic credit: Urja Upadhyaya For nearly a decade, the Internet Archive has hosted events at its headquarters in San Francisco, occasionally welcoming forward-thinking authors of give presentations about their recent books in the digital humanities. The COVID pandemic has been a catalyst for change, both in the types of challenges facing our communities and how we may address them. In 2020, many libraries w ..read more

Starting January 1st, you will be able to set and track your yearly reading goals with Open Library. Sending us Feedback Have you noticed a bug with the Yearly Reading Goals feature, have questions about how it works, or have feedback about how we may improve the experience? Please use this form to let us know! How to Set a Reading Goal A yearly reading goal may be set from your “My Books” page. To set a new reading goal, click the “Set reading goal” button (highlighted above) and enter the number of books that you’d like to read in the input, and press the “Submit” button. Upon submission ..read more

Have you noticed our new My Books page experience? Please let us know what you think! Forward by Mek This year we’ve had the great fortune of collaborating with Samuel Grunebaum, 2022 Open Library Design & Engineering Fellow. Samuel is wonderfully positioned at the cross-section of software engineering, design, and education, making him capable of rapidly prototyping new designs, ensuring these designs are clear and instructional, and bringing these designs to life through engineering. It’s rare I find someone, like Sam, who can so easily and effectively switch contexts between design and ..read more

Dear readers, I sit here, cosily on a cold winter’s night looking out over the Mississauga cityscape, thinking about the important mission we planned for and set out to accomplish almost a year ago: Empowering you, dear readers, to better search for and discover books on Open Library. For too many years now you’ve been limited in how books can be found from Open Library’s extensive catalogue. Since the dawn of its existence, Open Library’s goal has been to make one web page for every book ever published. And to make those books accessible! But one problem with having millions and millions of ..read more

It seems like just the other day when the Open Library welcomed its 2 millionth registered patron in 2018. This year, we zoomed past 6M registered book lovers who collectively in 2022 have borrowed 4.3M books and counting, and who have added more than 4.7M books to their reading logs. Our book catalog expanded to nearly 38M editions and we cleaned up nearly 230k low quality records. Together, our team released a flurry of features and improvements to the Open Library service including: Google Signup Account Anonymization & Data Exports Unified Search Page Navigation Improvements to Main ..read more

by Scott Barnes, 2022 Open Library Fellow As of last week’s deploy, it’s now possible to search the Open Library for the books in your reading log by navigating to the My Books page, selecting the Currently Reading, Want to Read, or Already Read bookshelf, and typing in a search query. Keep reading to learn tips and tricks on how to effectively search for books within your reading log. A Forward by Mek This year the Open Library has been exceedingly lucky to collaborate with Scott Barnes, a lawyer who has reinvented himself as a very capable software engineer. We had the pleasure of meeting S ..read more