Highlights From the 2025 Open Library Community Celebration This year, staff, fellows, and volunteers made a number of improvements to Open Library. Here are some highlights of contributors’ accomplishments in 2025, as presented in the annual Community Celebration. Watch the replay of our 2025 Community Celebration or these slides to learn more about these upgrades. […]

Setbacks. 2025 has been a challenging year for the Open Library community and the library world. We began the year by upgrading our systems in response to cybersecurity incidents and fortifying our web services to withstand relentless DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks from bots. We developed revised plans to achieve More with Less to […]

Each year since 2020, we’ve hosted a virtual celebration to honor the many global contributors who make the Open Library project possible and continuously improve the experience for our patrons. This year’s Open Library Community Celebration will be held virtually on Tuesday, Nov. 4, at 9 a.m. PDT. Volunteers, staff, patrons and friends of the […]

The Open Library is a card catalog of every book published spanning more than 50 million edition records. Fetching all of these records all at once is computationally expensive, so we use Apache Solr to power our search engine. This system is primarily maintained by Drini Cami and has enjoyed support from myself, Scott Barnes, […]

This summer, continuing a years-long tradition, Open Library and the Internet Archive took part in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a Google initiative focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. This year, I was lucky enough to mentor Sandy, a long-time Open Library volunteer, on an exciting project to increase the accessibility […]

by Roni Bhakta & Mek All around the world, sidewalk libraries have been popping up and improving people’s lives, grounded in our basic right to pass along the books we own: take a book, leave a book. As publishers transition from physical books to ebooks, they are rewriting the rules to strip away the ownership […]

A major update to the Open Library search engine now makes it easy for patrons to find books that are receiving spikes of interest. You may be familiar with the trending books featured on Open Library’s home page. Actually, you might be very familiar with them, because many seldom change! Our previous trending algorithm approximated […]

We recently improved the relevance of our Student Library collection by adding more than 10,000 reading levels to borrowable K-12 books in our search engine. What are Reading Levels? In the same way a library-goer may be interested in finding a book on a specific topic, like vampires, they may also be interested in narrowing […]

By Mek, Elizabeth Mays, & Ella Cuskelly A core aspect of Open Library’s mission is making the published works of humankind accessible to all readers, regardless of age, ability, or location. In service of this goal, the Internet Archive participates in a special access program to serve patrons who have certified print disabilities that impact […]

By Jordan Frederick AKA Tauriel063 (she/her), Canada When deciding where to complete my internship for my Master’s in Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree, Open Library was an obvious choice. Not only have I been volunteering as an Open Librarian since September 2022, but I have also used the library myself. I wanted to work […]