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.
- Ray Berger, volunteer Developer Experience Lead celebrated his fifth year with Open Library, having reviewed and merged more than 100 pull requests in 2025. This year Ray launched https://docs.openlibrary.org, a new searchable portal for developer documentation. To improve website performance, Ray upgraded the Open Library Search APIs to use FastAPI, a more performant, modern web framework. He has also helped modernize the code base to make it easier for developers to contribute.
- GSoC Engineering Fellow Sandy Chu worked with staff members Drini Cami and Mek to enable on-the-fly translations in BookReader. Now, books in BookReader can be translated into more than 40 languages. This project also enabled read-aloud capabilities in BookReader, which helps to close the accessibility gap for international readers.
- Engineering volunteers David Ragipi and Krishna Gowsami redesigned book lists to add a “follow” button next to usernames. The feature increased the number of patrons following each other from 182 to more than 3K followers in 2025.
- Under Mek’s mentorship, GSoc Engineering Fellow Roni Bhakta developed a prototype of Lenny, a self-hostable digital library for storing and lending EPUBs. Lenny gives libraries and individuals a lightweight way to host and securely lend the EPUBs they own.
- Engineering Fellow Ben Deitch worked with Drini to develop a new trending algorithm built on Solr that uses hour-by-hour statistics to give patrons fresh, timely books that are getting high interest at any given moment on Open Library. This feature replaced trending views that changed infrequently and also gives insight into what’s trending in a given subject.
- Engineering Fellow Stef Kischak worked with Drini to develop a script that scrapes Wikimedia APIs for Wikisource ebooks to import. Stef also made efforts to improve the import pipeline and identify orphaned editions to edit.
- Librarian Fellow Jordan Frederick imported reading levels metadata that improved the K-12 reading collection. Jordan also fixed metadata, split wrongly merged records, and created tutorials for Open Library patrons.
- New librarian volunteer Catherine Gosztonyi created the still-growing Canada Reads Awards collection on Open Library.
- Internet Archive Staff Member Lisa Seaberg celebrated the 684 volunteer librarians in the Open Library community Slack channel. Volunteer librarians improve the catalog by adding metadata, author info, images, and collections. Lisa also recognized multiple superlibrarians who reviewed hundreds of thousands of merge requests, curated special collections, and mentored librarians in training.
- Volunteer communications lead Elizabeth Mays, with team Nick Norman, Ella Cuskelly, and Jordan Frederick, doubled the number of blog posts published in 2025 and streamlined a process for writing and approving blog posts. The group also defined standard starter tasks for future volunteers toward projects that will enable more frequent social content.
- Staff member Drini Cami highlighted the work of the developer community on a unified read button, language-aware autocomplete and carousels, full-text list search, new librarian features, Wikipedia links on author pages, and Wikidata integration. Drini presented staff improvements such as a data-quality tool that lets librarians see which popular books are missing metadata, streamlined special access for patrons with qualifying print disabilities, grid view, and security improvements to prevent cyberattacks.
Watch the replay of our 2025 Community Celebration or these slides to learn more about these upgrades.
Previous Community Celebrations
This is Open Library’s sixth Community Celebration to recognize contributors, who come from more than 20 countries. Catch up on past years’ events at these links:
Get Involved
If you’d like to get involved, indicate your interest in volunteering with Open Library in this interest form. We’ll be in touch to connect you to the community Slack and weekly call.