2022 Review

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:

Imminently coming is a game changing smart edition-search upgrade, a Yearly Reading Goals feature, support for Web Books, a significantly more usable 1-stop “My Books” page, and design improvements to the Books Page.

Want to see a full run-down of what we accomplished together?
Check out our 2022 Open Library Community Celebration video!


Important Documents

If you’ve ever wanted to dig down deeper into the Open Library’s transparent processes:


Previous Community Celebrations

For the past 3 years around October, the Open Library has recognized its contributors by hosting an Open Library Community Celebration.


Historical Yearly Highlights

In addition to the yearly community celebration, we’ve tried to make end-of-year review posts to give the community transparency into our victories, changes, and planning. In:


Gratitude. Central to these achievements were my fellow staff on the Open Library’s engineering team: Drini Cami, Jim Champ, & Chris Clauss. Equally indispensable to this year’s achievements was Lisa Seaberg from Internet Archive’s Patron Services team. Lisa is both a voice and champion for our patrons as well as the Open Library’s Lead Community Librarian who helps facilitate our community of 500 librarian contributors and our Super Librarians (Daniel, Travis, Onno, et al) who work tirelessly together to keep our library catalog organized. Charles Horn from the openlibraries.online team has been instrumental in keeping MARC records flowing into the catalog and Cari Spivack on policy support. And this year 6 Open Library Fellows — Hayoon Choi, Sam Grunebaum, Dana Fein-Schaffer, Scott Barnes, Constantina Zouni, and Teo Cheng — who selflessly committed several months of their time to improve the Open Library platform for the world, alongside a team of more than 30 volunteer developers from around the globe. Thank you, of course, to Brewster Kahle and all of our patrons and generous donors for believing in us and keeping us funded for another year. And a special thank you to a sorely missed Aaron Swartz, without whom none of this would be possible.

Happy Thanksgiving!

– The Open Library Community

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