Open Library volunteers regularly work behind the scenes to build collections and improve access to books from around the world. One of these is Nazar Kotsur, who has contributed as a volunteer librarian since 2022.

A student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Japanese language and literature, Nazar first learned about Open Library through a language-learning group that shared a list of online resources. Drawn to its open-source mission, he became involved as a volunteer librarian. 

Among many projects, Nazar is curating a still-growing list of 64 books in Ukrainian that don’t have a readable copy in Open Library, as well as a collection-in-progress of Ukrainian literature for students. 

The list began as a personal resource Nazar uses to track books that appear to be missing from the internet—books or specific editions for which he has not been able to locate a PDF or other digital file.

These were “some interesting books I found, I like or I want to read and I was compiling the list because I couldn’t find the specific editions,” Nazar says. 

The list contains works spanning topics from the Ukrainian fight for independence to the country’s history and culture, as well as fiction and literature. 

Many of these books have not yet been preserved digitally. While some of the books are modern and might be present in a library, others are from the 1920s or 1930s and could be difficult to find even in physical form. A few of the books on the list are public domain works, which have files that Nazar hopes to later add to Ukrainian Wikisource. 

The work has become all the more urgent as recently, the biggest Ukrainian online library, Chtyvo, closed. It contained 87,000+ books, some of them not available anywhere else, including many public domain works. Nazar, who is currently collaborating with others to preserve records from that site as well, says this was a big loss for the Ukrainian humanities and for readers. 

Nazar is no stranger to open source projects. Today, Nazar is also a part-time Wikisource development consultant for Wikimedia Ukraine.

Wikisource is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation that aims to build a freely accessible online library of source texts, including translations of those works in many languages.

At Wikisource, Nazar organizes proofreading contests and finds new contributors by reaching out to students and professors to help speed up preservation efforts.

“My contributions in Open Library right now mostly consist of fixing the books that were proofread on Wikisource and adding IDs so that the Read button [on Open Library] becomes available,” Nazar says.

This is important because when patrons click the Read button on Open Library, they get redirected to the online book reader with scanned PDF or DJVU files of the edition. This enables them to see the pages from editions as images with the original printed text, color, previous owners’ notes in the margins and often for old books, various defects. This is excellent for preservation, but can make reading harder, especially if for those with less-than-perfect vision or who are reading on a small screen.

“Open Library is a great project that has done a lot to preserve various books in digital form and make them available for reading to people around the world,” Nazar says. “Wikisource is quite similar to Open Library in that its goal is to preserve books and a lot of the files we work on actually come from Open Library, but the way Wikisource goes around this task is different.” 

Wikisource editors transcribe the pages of scanned books into digital form, preserving the original structure and formatting. That allows for a better reading experience, in which readers can configure the font and size of the text. The ability to resize text to fit the screen size is more convenient on small screens or when a book has burned-out letters, water damage, or other defects. Most important, these texts can be put into text-to-speech software so that visually impaired people can access them too.

Once a Wikisource ID is added to the edition in Open Library, it will redirect users to the text in Wikisource, where it may be more convenient to read.

Nazar continues to add Wikisource IDs to the books in the lists and many others. 

If you would like to contribute to projects like this one, you can indicate your interest in volunteering as a librarian in this form and connect with Nazar in the librarians Slack channel.