Author Archives: mek

About mek

Citizen of the World, Open Librarian @ openlibrary.org

It takes a Classroom to build an Open Library

On most days, the Open Library is hard at work improving the experience it offers to students and teachers in classrooms. But for the past few months, Open Library has had the privilege of enjoying contributions from 7 students around the globe who had been assigned by their universities to participate on open source software projects.

First and foremost, the entire Open Library community extends our deep gratitude to AUEB / Athens University of Economics and Business‘s Dr. Diomidis Spinellis (professor of Software Engineering, who taught the course Software Engineering in Practice) and NYU‘s Dr. Joanna Klukowska (Clinical Associate Professor of Computer Science, who taught the course CSCI-UA.0480-061, Open Source Software Development) for incorporating open source contributions into the curriculum of their classrooms. As we hope you’ll see, the decision to promote hands-on development has an outsized impact on supporting open source projects like ours.

In the spring semester of 2022, four students from Greece’s AUEB (Constantina Z., Vassilis B., Dimitris B., and Philippos P. / Φιλιππος Π.) and three students from NYU (Michelle T., Crystal C., Chloe Q.) spent time participating in community calls, problem solving, and improving the Open Library service for the public. In return they received mentorship and first-hand experience learning how to contribute to a platform trusted by millions of international readers.

This year, the foci of Open Library’s roadmap is improving core experiences for patrons. Towards this goal, each of these students exceeded our expectations by contributing meaningful improvements like: Chinese internationalization of the website, google analytics to help inform us on meaningful ways to improve the organization of the website, fixing broken mobile navigation for our Books Page, UI improvements for sharing books on social media, adding APIs for Trending Books, and much more. We’re extremely proud of and grateful for the work these students were able to contribute.

In the past, Open Library has reserved a special honorary title of “Open Library Fellow” for exemplary contributors who have demonstrated exceptional commitment, leadership, and impact with the Open Library project. Our list of previous Fellows include Sabreen Parveen (who designed our onboarding experience), Yash Saravgi (who developed our mobile Progressive Web App), and Bharat Kalluri (who helped standardize our import pipelines). Each dedicated several months implementing features which redefined core behaviors and experiences of the Open Library.

This year, we believe one student in particular, Constantina Zouni, stands out as being especially deserving of this special Fellowship distinction, for her initiative, participation in engineering and design process with stakeholders, and outstanding work ethic.

Please join us in celebrating the work of this 2022 international student cohort, sharing our gratitude, and congratulating Constantina on her inspiring example.

Improving Experiences for Open Library Patrons

By Constantina Zouni

As this semester of my studies is coming to an end, I want to do a retrospect about my experience with the open library project.

My Journey with Open Library

In the beginning of the semester my professor Dr. Diomidis Spinellis for the course “Software Engineering in Practice” announced that in the context of an assignment we had to choose an open source project to make contributions thought out the semester. As a result, I started searching for a project and I was lucky to quickly find open library’s repository. Some of the main reason that made me to choose that project is that the community was very friendly and really open to contributors. The documentation of the project was really detailed and there were videos that helped me understand how the project works. Also, another good thing was that the issues of the project were well organized with labels and the context was explanatory enough. Moreover, the project seemed to be very active with quick responses in the comments section and pull request merges almost every day. After the first communication with the team everything went very smoothly. I was welcomed in the slack channel, and I was invited to participate in the weekly meetings. Mek quickly stepped in and helped me to get started. Because that period was busy and contributors from other universities also chose to contribute to open library the project’s team made effort to create a GitHub project and assign issues to everyone. I started solving minor issues related with text appearing when not needed, adding the subtitle to the search results and some UI improvements. Ultimately, in collaboration with another student from my university Vassilis Bubis we created the twitter social card that enables users to share their book lists. Through out the whole period that I contributed to the project I was impressed that Mek and the other members of the open library team dedicated time answering our messages and even jumping on small zoom meetings.

Book page header in mobile

One of the issues that I think had a big impact in the open library users is the improvement of the book page header in the mobile environment. When users visited a book page from mobile the experience wasn’t that pleasant. The book title and other important information like the author, the subtitle etc didn’t fit in the phone screen and the user had to scroll down to see them. The issue was more significant in the cases where the book covers were ambiguous, and it made difficult for the user to understand if they were in the correct page. Jim Champ recommended to follow a specific layout for the book page in mobile in order to fit all the important information in the mobile page. The challenge was the layout had to be different depending on the device of the user. My first implementation involved some java script code that change the order of the elements and an event listener that was activated when the screen had a specific size. The open library team quickly informed me that this implementation was causing a delay in the loading of the page, and they recommended me to use HTML and CSS. This time with a new implementation and the help of Jim Champ who was reviewing my pull request I managed to solve the issue using an HTML file that included only the title summary and some CSS commands.

Book header in mobile before and after

Dynamic book list preview for sharing

This new feature was a little more challenging than the previous one. This time I collaborated with Vassilis Bubis in order to create a dynamic preview for the book lists of the users that displays the first 5 books of the list. Then this preview is passed to the twitter social card and every time a user wants to share a list with the URL the preview image appears. This is a more interactive way for users to show their book lists to others and makes open library more recognizable across twitter users. The first challenge was to create a mock-up of the preview. To achieve that I used a design tool called Figma to create prototypes with different colour combinations and I let the open library team to decide which on they like more. For the design I used colours from the open library’s webpage, and I added a twist in the preview that represents a self where the books are placed. Alongside with the mock-ups Vassilis worked on retrieving the book covers that we need and place them above the background with the help of a Python library called Pillow. Then I stepped in, and I made sure that every book cover was resized in a way proportional to the original dimensions that it had. We noticed that some covers were stretching so it was important that every time we changed the width of a cover the height was adjusted properly. Another challenge was the text that we wanted to add in the preview. The text had to change dynamically, and we had to change line every time the characters exceeded a specific number to achieve an aesthetically pleasant result. One issue that we faced was that the coordinates of the covers that we had figured out with Figma had to change because in python the coordinates are applied from upper left corner compared to Figma that apply to the center of an image. After solving that Vassilis and I proceeded on storing the image in an in-memory binary array for better performance and finally creating the API for the list page.

Twitter social card for book lists sharing

Book page editing improvement

While working on some issues in the book page I realised that compared to other library webpages open library gives users the ability to edit the details and the information of a book. That feature is very valuable because users can add important details for a book that were missing when it was added, they can update that information and they can add descriptions and subjects that might be useful for other users. Although this feature is really important the editing user interface is not that pleasant. When users click on the edit button, they are directed to another page. My recommendation regarding that is to use a modal that pops up when the button is clicked. In that way users will feel like they have more control because they won’t be directed to another page, and they can still see the book page behind the modal. Another issue with the existing editing form is that users can discard the changes with the cancel button, but they can’t undo a change without deleting all the changes. In the mock-up that I created I added an arrow in the right upper side that symbolizes the undo action. I noticed that the examples for every field were placed next to the field title, and I opted to move them inside the text box for a clearer look. Finally, I added the info symbols beside every field that provides details on how you should fill out that specific field. Overall, the purpose of those recommendations is to make the booking editing more simple, compact and user friendly.

Book editing page now
Edit book page with modal created with Figma

A High Schooler’s Experience Contributing to the Open Book Genome Project

Meet Teo Cheng, a high school student who has been volunteering to lead development on the Open Book Genome Project. In 2021, Teo took Harvard’s online CS50 Intro to Computer Science to prepare for his AP Computer Science Principles exam. The following summer, he took MIT’s Introduction to Computer Science and Programming course. To put these learnings into practice and gain more hands-on experience, he searched for impactful opportunities within the non-profit Internet Archive, where his father Brenton Cheng runs the UX team. For the past year, Teo has been working closely with Mek, making improvements to the Open Book Genome Project Sequencer — a software robot that reads the Internet Archive’s publicly available books and derives public insights to enable greater access to their themes and data. Meet Teo!

Goals

This year, by joining the Open Book Genome Project team, I hoped to understand a piece of production software well enough to make meaningful contributions. Also, because this project may someday be run on every book digitized by the Internet Archive, I wanted to gain experience contributing to something which needs to have a high level of accuracy and runtime performance. When I joined the project, I learned of several problems. For example, the book sequencer module, which is responsible for deriving ngrams, was noisy and wasn’t honoring the defined stop words. Also, the page type detection would frequently break because it was too strict and wasn’t robust against OCR errors, punctuation, and variety in syntax. Furthermore, because I already have experience programming, I was interested in learning more about the engineering development process, such as using tools like git, writing tests, and running pipelines.

What I’ve Learned

So far while working on the Open Book Genome Project (OBGP) I’ve gained experience with the following 10 things: I learned how to use docker to install a project in a contained way without having to mess up my computer’s file system. I used ssh to run the OBGP pipeline on a more powerful remote computer. Because the internet connection could be disrupted, we did our work using a program called tmux which ensured our processes would continue running even if the connection between the client and server died. This remote computer ran Linux and so I needed to learn basic BASH commands. I also needed to learn about XML and JSON formats, and how those are used in the results of our pipeline. We used bash commands and regex (e.g. grep) to analyze the pipeline results, such as to extract URL counts from books. Some bash commands I used to discover link counts are: for loop, grep, variables, cat, wc. I worked on improving the existing OBGP Sequencer, so I had to learn how to read through and understand a new codebase. To submit our code changes, we used the git protocol and managed our tasks on GitHub.

Accomplishments

In addition to learning a lot throughout working on the Open Book Genome Project, I’ve accomplished a few different things. I noticed the issue with the Page Type Detector, which I solved. My improvement to the detector involved allowing regex patterns in addition to exact text matches. I also improved the ISBN detector to reduce false positives, which were happening pretty commonly. Lastly, I solved the bug with the stop words that get removed from the ngrams to make them less noisy and more useful. I also added more stop words to decrease the amount of clutter in the ngram results.

How it Works

As a developer on the Open Book Genome Project, here’s an inside look at what it’s like when staff members run the Sequencer on Internet Archive’s books:

  1. Set up the project using the Docker instructions
  2. On Archive.org, identify a search query which returns the books we want to sequence
  3. Create an AdvancedSearch query which returns identifiers for these books in JSON
  4. Reformat the results from this query and feed it into the Sequencer pipeline

Here’s an example of a completed book_genome.json created by this process.

Want to try it yourself?

You can add your own processing modules too! If you’d like to try out the Open Book Genome Project Sequencer using just your browser, you can try it using the OBGP google colab.

Learn More

Want to learn more about the Open Book Genome Project? Check out the official bookgenomeproject.org website, Open Library’s announcement of the project, and learn about the work of Nolan Windham who previously led development on the project as a high school senior and incoming college freshman as part of Google Summer of Code.

Want to contribute?

Come volunteer to be an Open Library or Open Book Genome Project fellow!

Open Library in Every Language

The Open Library catalog is used by patrons from across the globe, but its usage is predominated by English speakers (32% US, 9% India, 5% UK, 4% Canada). This is driven by four factors which we’re working to change.

  1. International Holdings – It goes without saying that, in order to be an Open Library for the Internet™ our catalog needs to include book records and link to source material from more languages. We’re actively working with the acquisitions team within the Internet Archive to fight for greater diversification of our book holdings, including more languages and regions. If you are an international library or publisher, you may help us by sharing your catalog metadata and we’ll happily include these records on Open Library & provide back-links so patrons know where the metadata comes from.
  2. Search – In order for Open Library to be as useful as possible for diverse communities around the globe, our search engine has to show patrons the right books with appropriately translated titles. Managing a search engine for a service like Open Library is a full-time job. Presently, this gargantuan task is spearheaded by Drini Cami. Presently, because of historical reasons & performance, the Open Library search engine indexes on Works (collections of editions) as opposed to Editions. This limits our ability to tailor search results and show patrons book editions in their preferred language. This year we made progress on supporting Edition-level indexing and “search for books in language” (one of our most requested features) will be on our roadmap for 2022.
  3. Marketing – Open Library is run by a small team of staff that you can count on one hand and our success depends on the efforts of volunteers who champion literacy and librarianship for their communities. We’re still learning which channels may be best to extend our offerings to patrons in regions which we’re currently under-serving. If you have an idea on how we can reach a new community, we’d love your advice and your help. Please send us you ideas using the “Communication & Outreach” link on our volunteer page.
  4. Translation & Localization – Making a website like Open Library accessible and usable to an international audience takes more than clicking “google translate”. For years Open Library has had a pipeline and process for adding translations.

Goal: 5 Languages

Our current goal is to fully localize the Open Library website into 10 languages. We currently have contributions for translations across 7 languages: Čeština, Deutsch, English, Español, Français, Hrvatski, and తెలుగు.

English, Spanish, French, and Croatian (Hrvatski) are the most up to date and you can try the website in those languages by clicking their respective links. Can you help us get one of these other languages across the finish line?

Why Contribute Now?

In the past, translators did not have an automatic way to receive feedback about whether they had contributed translations correctly. Translators would need to have a conversation with staff in order to get started, submit translations for review, and then a member of staff would report back if there was a mistake. This process had so much friction that it resulted in many incomplete translation submissions.

This year, Jim Champ, Drini Cami, and others in the community added automated validation so translators get near-real time feedback about whether translations had been submitted correctly. Now, submitting a translation is much simpler and only requires one to know the target language. Here’s how!

How it Works

All you need in order to contribute translations is a Github account. Translations can be contributed directly on the Github website by following the Translator’s Contributor’s Guide with no special software required to participate.

Want to Help Translate?

Let us know here: https://openlibrary.org/volunteer#translator

Meet our Translators

Daniel – Spanish

Daniel Capilla lives in Málaga, Spain and has been contributing to Open Library since 2013. Daniel’s interest in contributing to Open Library was sparked by his joy of reading and all things  library-and-book-related as well as the satisfaction he gets from contributing to open source projects and knowing that everyone will be able to freely enjoy his contributions in the future. Dan has made significant contributions by adding a first Spanish translation and believes:

“The issue of the internationalization of the Open Library seems to me to be a fundamental issue for the project to have more acceptance, especially in non-English speaking countries. This is an issue on which there is still much to be done.”

Follow Daniel on twitter: @dcapillae

2021 End-of-Year Community Updates

Hi Open Library Community! This is going to be a less formal post detailing some of our recent community meetings and exciting Q3 (quarter 3) opportunities to learn, celebrate, and participate with the Open Library project.

Earlier this Month

Upcoming Events

  1. 📙 Library Leader’s Forum 2021-10-13 & 2021-10-20
  2. 🎉 Open Library Community Celebration (RSVP) 2021-10-26
  3. 📅 2022 Roadmap Community Planning (join) 2021-11-02 @ 10am PT

Open Library Community Celebration 2021

Last year we started the tradition of doing an Open Library Community Celebration to honor the contributions & impact of those in our community. On October 26, 2021 @ 10am Pacific we will be hosting our 2nd annual community celebration. We hope you can join us!

During this online event, you’ll hear from members of the community as we:

  • Announce our latest developments and their impacts
  • Raise awareness about opportunities to participate
  • Show a sneak-peek into our future: 2022

EDIT: The Community Celebration happened and you may watch it here!


5-Year Vision

End of September on 2021-09-28 @ 10am PT, the Open Library community came together to brainstorm Open Library’s possible long-term directions. Anyone in the community is welcome to comment and add their notes and thoughts:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q_jAcdEc705H3gsZv_Yt_08c8YFmefdSvMbiljc2O8g/edit#


2021 Year-End Review

On 2021-10-12 @ 10am PT the community met to review what we had accomplished (see review doc) on our 2021 roadmap.


2022 Community Planning

First week of November on 2021-11-02 @ 10am PT the community will meet to brainstorm goals for Open Library’s 2022 roadmap. This community planning call will be open to the public here.

EDIT: Community Planning happened and you can see the results or leave comments using the 2022 roadmap link.

EDIT: Our 2022 Priorities can now be seen here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1edU3lCTHAjFr1mXUilh8l1_rNek33pRTzFHltBU–fM/edit#

How one volunteer is sharing a better reading experience with all of us

For nearly 15 years Open Library has been giving patrons free access to information about books in its catalog, direct to their computers. But for millions of readers across the globe who rely on their phones for access, this hasn’t always presented the ideal mobile reading experience.

This year, a volunteer within the Open Library community named Mark developed an independent mobile app, an unofficial companion to the website called the Open Library Reader. This lite app, which is available for free from the Apple store and Play store, emphasizes the mobile reading experience and showcases the books within a patron’s Open Library reading log. It’s a great way to take your personal library with you on the go.

While Open Library Reader is an unofficial app which is not maintained or supported by the staff at Internet Archive, we’re ecstatic that talented volunteers within our community are stepping up to design new experiences they wish existed for themselves and others. We applaud Mark, not only for the time he invested and showing what’s possible with our APIs, but — true to the spirit of Open Library — for sharing his app for free with patrons, in such a way which seems to respect patron privacy.

We sat down with Mark for an interview to learn why he created the Open Library Reader and which of its features may be appreciated by book lovers who are on the go.

A picture of a patron’s personal library when logged in to the Open Library Reader app

Open Librarian: “Why did you find the need to build an Open Library Reader?”

Mark: I read a lot of books on my iPad, especially old, hard-to-find mystery novels. Open Library has a lot of great reads, but I was getting frustrated trying to manage my Reading Log and read books in the tablet browser. There was a lot of scrolling and clicking around, a tap in the wrong place could send me off somewhere else, and the book I was reading was always surrounded by browser and bookreader controls. I just wanted to sit down and read, and not have to be reminded of the fact that I was looking at a website through a browser.

Open Librarian: What were some of the approaches Open Library Reader used to solve these problems?

Mark: I thought about some of the good tablet-based reading experiences I’ve had, and imagined what it could look like if the interface were centered around the individual reader and the small set of tools they need to find, manage, and read books. So the Reading Log shelves and the reading interface are the core of the app, and everything else kind of happens at the edges. Everything you need is just one tap away. The reading interface is still the familiar Internet Archive BookReader, but I’ve overlaid some additional functionality. You can hide all the controls with the single tap, and the book expands to completely fill the screen. I also added a swipe gesture, so it’s easy to turn pages if you’re holding your device with one hand on the couch.

Open Librarian: What does it feel like to use? Can we have a tour?

Mark:

Open Librarian: What is your favorite part of the app? I like how it shows the return time

Mark: That is cool — that’s another example of centering the needs of the reader. It’s hard to pick a favorite part. Every feature is the result of me reading in the app every day for months before I released it. Periodically, I’d think “that’s kind of annoying” or “I wish I could…” and I’d go code for a while until I was happy with the experience. But the full-screen reading mode is probably my favorite. With the high-resolution page scans expanded to fill the screen, it’s almost like reading a physical book.

Open Librarian: What was your experience like developing the Reader?

Mark: I’m a retired web developer, so interface design, user experience, APIs and that sort of thing are nothing new, but I’ve never built a native app. After some reading, I picked Google’s Flutter tool, which allows easy cross-platform app development. I was amazed at how fast it was to assemble a simple app with just a few lines of code, and then it was just a matter of layering on the functionality I wanted. I spent a lot of time exploring the Open Library and Internet Archives APIs to figure out the best way to get at the data I needed, and even submitted a few updates to the Open Library codebase to support features I wanted to build. The Open Library team was extremely welcoming and supportive, and really made this app possible.

How can you support Mark’s work?

First, try downloading the Open Library Read App from the Apple store or Play store. If you have a suggestion, question, or feedback for Mark, send him an email to olreader@loomis-house.com. If you appreciate his work, consider rating the app on the app stores and leaving a review so others may discover and enjoy it too. To learn more about Mark and the Open Library Reader, look out for his upcoming interview on the Open Library Community Podcast.

Want to contribute to Open Library too?

See all the ways you can volunteer within the Open Library community!