Category Archives: Collections

Canada Reads Awards: My Journey Championing Canadian Content on Open Library 

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By Catherine Gosztonyi

Hi! I’m Catherine, a curious and avid librarygoer, currently pursuing a career transition into the Library and Information Sciences field.

I joined the Open Library Librarian’s Team as a Librarian-In-Training during the summer of 2025 to learn about the world of online libraries, contribute to an open source project, and be part of a library community. My initial objective was to learn how to work with book metadata in MARC format but what I ended up learning, and what I’m still learning, has far surpassed my expectations. Before I took on this role, I didn’t know how to code in HTML or Markup (or any code, really). I had never contributed to an open-source project or submitted a GitHub ticket – and now I’ve done all three! I’ve also created a curated collection, tagged books by subject to further categorize them within the Open Library catalog, and learned how to create book carousels using the subject tags to visually display a collection of books on a page.

As I write about and reflect on my Open Library journey, I’m so proud of what I’ve learned and accomplished, and of the wonderful time I’m having engaging with the Open Library community.

Getting Started & Deciding How to Contribute

I discovered Open Library through the Internet Archive while researching volunteer opportunities within libraries. Open Library‘s mission resonated with me, and I felt called to join the community to help make knowledge free and accessible. I submitted my application and not long after, I was invited to the community Slack.

When I joined the Open Library Slack channel as a Librarian-In-Training, I was ready and excited to get started but realized I had no idea where or how to begin. I gained my bearings by reading through the instructional documentation and the Librarians In Training (LIT) Guide, letting the information guide me as I explored and familiarized myself with the website’s layout, behaviours, content, and pages. My interest piqued when I read the How to Create Curated Collections guide and saw how well the Star Wars and Star Trek collections had been curated. Inspired, I decided to contribute a curated collection of my own, though I was unsure what my collection would showcase. It was while going through the list of all the curated collections that I noticed a distinct lack of Canadian literary awards representation. As a Canadian, this was something I needed to remedy! I decided to highlight Canadian content on Open Library by creating a collection for the CBC’s Canada Reads Awards. This is a literary award I am very familiar with, having read many of the championed books, and one that I continuously use to inspire my own reading list.

About the CBC’s Canada Reads Awards

Canada Reads is a radio program broadcast yearly on CBC Radio One in which five celebrity judges champion and debate a book in the hope of it winning and being crowned as Canadian’s must-read book of the year. The radio show takes place over five days in five hour-long segments with one book voted off each day. Canada Reads was launched in 2002 and is still going strong. It also has a French equivalent on Radio Canada called Le combat national des livres.

My familiarity with the books and subject matter helped me understand the scope of the project and visualize the ways in which I wanted to present the collection. My vision for this curated collection was to have displayed, on one page and by each award year, the book winners and contenders along with the people who championed them. It was quite a learning process to set up this collection, and I’m so happy with the way it turned out.

Establishing the Collection

Before I even created a curated collection page for the awards, I compiled a list of all the Canada Reads books in my notes, separated by year from 2002 – 2025, noting the winners and contenders and who championed the books. Thankfully, this was an easy step as all the books are very well documented on the CBC’s website. I brought this information into Open Library by creating personal lists in my Open Library account for each award year and manually searching for and adding the books to their respective lists. With over 100 books to add, this was a tedious, time-consuming, and unsustainable process. I knew there had to be a more efficient way to complete this task, but I didn’t know how. I chipped away at it for a while and learned as I went, also taking the time to update the book metadata to ensure the accuracy of records, editions and general book information. However, I was getting overwhelmed by the process, my questions were adding up, and I couldn’t seem to find the answers I was looking for in the documentation. It was time to turn to the community for help. I was so relieved to discover the weekly Open Library Community Zoom calls on Tuesdays, where I would get to ask my questions to actual human beings – and have conversations! 

Open Library Community Calls

Joining that first community call was instrumental in my Librarian-In-Training journey and for the development of my Canada Reads curated collection. I was immediately welcomed, supported, and made to feel like a part of the community. I had the opportunity to present my collection for the first time, share my vision, and explain my pain points. I was met with enthusiasm and incredible insights that eased my overwhelm and helped me move forward. I hadn’t realized how, in vocalizing my project to the community, it would help me feel so connected, supported, and invested in seeing my project through. 

Every community call I have attended has provided me with the tidbits of information needed to help me develop the skills required to execute my vision. These community calls have been an invaluable resource and remain a delightful part of my week.

Among the pieces of information I received during these calls was news of the bulk editing tool, which enabled me to automatically add, from a typed list, all the Canada Reads books by year to my personal lists, saving me a lot of time and manual labour. I also learned the intricacies of editing book metadata according to industry standards. And I learned how to set up a curated collection page along with the coding required to create book carousels, which visually enhance the look of my collection pages. Each step has helped me establish my collection and display the information the way I envisioned. I now have a good understanding of the technical knowledge required to set up a collection page, and though there is still plenty to learn, I feel a lot more confident in my technical skills than I did when I started.

Leveling Up the Collection with Subject Tags

Having gained these new skills and technical knowledge, I was encouraged during a community call to take my Canada Reads collection to the next level by adding unique subject tags to each book championed during Canada Reads. This not only categorized the books into a Canada Reads subject page and increased their searchability across the Open Library catalog, it also served as the basis for the coding required to create book carousels.

Subject tags are part of a book’s metadata and are added according to the subjects found in the book as well as any subject the book might be associated with. For Canada Reads, I used three unique subject tags to categorize each championed book into a specific Canada Reads subject, as described in the table below: 

Canada Reads Subject Tags
Subject TagDescription
Collection:Canada ReadsGeneral subject tag added to all the books championed during Canada Reads over the years
Collection:Canada Reads WinnerSpecific subject tag added only to the Canada Reads book winners 
Collection:Canada Reads YearCollection:Canada Reads 2025Specific subject tag added to all the Canada Reads books according to the year in which they were championed

For each subject that is tagged, Open Library automatically creates a subject page that groups all the tagged books and displays them on the page. The subject page displays a book carousel of all the tagged books. In the section below the carousel, the metadata of those books is displayed by category, showcasing the publishing history, related subjects, places, people, and times. It is a great place to see the book metadata in one place and the variety of topics within a collection. With the right librarian privileges, these subject pages can be edited and spruced up.

I was granted editing permission to maintain the Collection:Canada Reads subject page and decided to set it up in the same way as I had done for my curated collection. I did so for visual consistency as well as ease of editing. By using the same format on both pages, I can copy any updates I make on one page and paste them onto the other. There are technical differences between the Collection:Canada Reads subject page and the Canada Reads Awards curated collection page, but the only visual difference is the logo, which I specifically changed to help me distinguish between the two pages when I’m working on them.

I wanted to include book carousels on my pages because they add a dynamic and interactive element that, to me, feels like a more realistic library experience than scrolling through a wall of text on a webpage. Although the coding for the book carousels confused me at first, I was guided through my confusion during a community call. In these calls, others walked me through the coding process and explained the technical setup of the subject tags. I was able to understand how the unique Collection:Canada Reads subject tags I had been adding would form the basis of the code required to create the book carousels. I used the code below, only changing the ‘collection:‘ and ‘title=’ elements to match the collection I wanted to have displayed on the page.

{{QueryCarousel(‘subject:(“collection:Canada Reads 2025″)’, search=False, has_fulltext_only=False, title=”Canada Reads 2025”, limit=20)}}
Screenshot of part of Canada Reads 2025 collection on Open Library

Celebrating My Canada Reads Collection 

From August 2025 to November 2025, I was focused on building my Canada Reads collection pages, attending the Community calls on a weekly basis, and learning everything I could to make them come to life. I took on this project knowing it would be an excellent challenge, and one I am continuing to meet with openness and curiosity. 

This collection has taken on a life of its own. Although I never expected to share it with anyone, I am tremendously glad I joined that first community call to share it with the Open Library team. Since then, I have established two Canada Reads collection pages, updated the metadata on many books, written this blog post, and even got the opportunity to present my collection at the 2025 Open Library Community Celebration in November 2025!

I couldn’t have predicted what I’ve accomplished with this collection, nor the recognition I’ve received. I’m incredibly proud of the work I’ve done and so, so grateful for the Open Library team’s support, without which I wouldn’t have gotten this far. 

Next Steps for the Collection

This collection is a work in progress and as of this blog’s publication date, I have completed the award years from 2016 – 2025. Over the coming months, my goal is to add the remaining books from 2002 – 2015 as well as clean up the metadata for each book. I will also add the 2026 books once Canada Reads has concluded in April 2026.

This is a manual process that can be fairly time consuming as editing book metadata varies greatly depending on the popularity of the book and the number of editions it has. Although I would love for my collection to be complete, I am making sure not to rush the process and to take the necessary time to correctly input the information and create a collection that is accurate – and one that I am proud of.

My hope for this collection is for people to enjoy it and hopefully, be inspired to read some Canadian content. 

If you would like to contribute to Open Library as a librarian, you can fill out this form and join the Slack channel and the weekly community call. Other contributors will provide mentorship and help you get started. 

Featuring Nazar Kotsur: Tracking Ukrainian Books Missing from the Digital Commons

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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.

A Community-Curated Nancy Drew Collection

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A team of volunteer Open Librarians have worked together to organize the many Nancy Drew book series into a beautiful collection on Open Library. 

If you’re excited about this collection, you can direct your thanks to Open Library volunteer Emily, who proposed the project. A few months ago, Emily put out a call in Open Library’s librarian Slack channel to see if other librarians might be interested in teaming up. Today, the collection is live and ready for the benefit of the public.

A collaborative approach was second nature for Emily, a librarian and educator who recently completed a Master of Information program. 

“Almost all of our projects were group work to help prepare us to work together and collaborate in libraries,” she said.

To organize the project, Emily built a detailed Google Document with information, ideas, questions about methodology and choices the team would need to make as a group. Participants added thoughts and notes asynchronously before the call.

An initial Zoom call then brought the team of volunteers together in real time. The call was held in a time zone that worked for the international contributors, who came from Tokyo, Pakistan and the western U.S.

“I think it was really important to do a video call to start things off, just to really just humanize everyone,” Emily said. “Like you see everyone a little bit, you hear their voices, you know that you’re working together. You know that you’re a team, and that helps everyone stay motivated.”

Maahin, located in Pakistan, worked on two series of the collection, Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew and Nancy Drew Notebooks. She had long wanted to become a librarian. “Being in a place where there’s no scope of reading and related professions, Open Library is the best chance to contribute in book-related tasks, and it motivated me finding you can contribute to it remotely,” she said.

On the kickoff call, contributors aligned on preliminary decisions, discussed how to divide the work and shared their reasons for contributing.

How best to build the collection required some sleuthing. Contributors explored various methods to build collections and tag large numbers of works. They considered using Python scripts to automate finding books and adding metadata, but determined the approach was impractical given the extensive metadata cleaning and large-scale review this project required, combined with limitations in their current technical expertise. In addition, they experimented with alternative versions of the current carousel code. However, they found that these new versions would result in a lag when users loaded the page. Contributors wanted to make sure the collection would be accessible to anyone, regardless of their Internet speed.

Because this was such a large collection with so many different series, Emily checked behind the scenes to learn how similar collections in Open Library had been built. 

With that info in view, a decision was made to manually tag books’ subject fields with a collectionid: tag for each series. 

Nichole, who focused on the Nancy Drew: Girl Detective and Nancy Drew on Campus series of the collection, joined the project out of a desire to learn.

“I was new to the Open Library and wanted to learn how to create collections and hone my metadata editing skills,” she said “I also noticed that we had a Hardy Boys series but not a Nancy Drew series, which felt like a gap.”

Working on metadata taught Nichole about source verification. Most of her previous metadata assignments involved checking single documents or websites, so she assumed the task of editing metadata for a series of books would be straightforward. But this project required evaluating and aggregating information from multiple sources. 

“It was surprisingly challenging to confirm basic facts (like how many editions of a Nancy Drew book exist and how they were published) and find reliable information.”

Another volunteer, Liz, consulted portions of the book, “Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her” by Melanie Rehak. The biography identified another of the major challenges for the collection–many of the Nancy Drew books in Open Library had been attributed to the wrong ghostwriter, instead of the pen name Carolyn Keene. The pen name refers to numerous ghostwriters across different works and editions of the books (such as reissues). But most of the books in the library attributed the wrong ghostwriter as the author. 

Lead Staff Librarian Lisa Seaberg helped to correct conflated author metadata, a common issue when a pseudonym is shared by multiple authors and when multiple authors have the same name.

The collection as it stands represents many hours of metadata cleanup from each of the contributors. 

For future groups collaborating on collections, Emily suggests live-demo-ing how to edit the metadata before asking people to do it. “I think we all had to go on an individual journey of reading the documentation and figuring out how to do it,” Emily said. 

Contributors each had their own reasons for helping to bring the Nancy Drew collection to life. 

“For me, there’s definitely some nostalgia,” Nichole said. “I grew up during the era of Nancy Drew PC games and remember playing Nancy Drew: The Phantom of Venice. But I also appreciate Nancy Drew as a character. Growing up, I read a lot of detective fiction and became familiar with detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, S. S. Van Dine and Hajime Kindaichi. Nancy Drew feels unique — not just in age and life experience but also in personality and technique.”

Emily grew up on a small dairy farm in rural Canada, without access to many TV channels. “It was just so nice to have these stories that I could access — this huge wealth of narratives about a woman who was really curious,” Emily said. “It was just a really good role model for me growing up.”

Maahin joined for the chance to do library work. “I am excited to work on all kinds of tasks including documentation and cataloguing and every other thing that is related to books and library,” she said.

Work on the collection and cleanup of metadata in the current collection is still ongoing, with continuing opportunities to contribute. Some of these include adding series tags or special featured collections, such as the books that inspired the Nancy Drew computer game series.

Emily also aspires to make the books appear in order in the series. (Currently the order is tied to the date of the most recent edition.) “If we could find a developer who can find a solution to help us make all these books appear in order in the series, that would be wonderful,” Emily said. 

The project took months from start to finish. The work to clean metadata and get the first eight series of 500-plus books into the collection was substantial, but rewarding.

“It was work to learn how to do it, but it is so satisfying to have built something and help share the things that helped you have a love of reading with other people,” Emily said. “And it’s been really wonderful to connect with similarly minded people as well.”

If you would like to contribute to this or future collections projects at Open Library, fill out this volunteer form.

Image of a few series in the new Nancy Drew Collection on Open Library. Shows carousel selections from Nancy Drew on Campus and Nancy Drew Girl Detective.


Lessons Learned:

  • How to Build Collections: For now, manually tagging books’ subject fields with a collectionid: tag for each series, and copying the code from past multi-series collections, is the most expedient way to build a collection.
  • Human Connection Matters: Meeting fellow librarians, combined with defined asynchronous processes, can help a collaborative project go smoothly. 
  • Live Training Could Save Time: Future projects would benefit from a short live demonstration of metadata editing at the outset. This could reduce the learning curve and help volunteers feel confident contributing sooner.

Connecting K-12 Students With Books by Reading Level

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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.

Screenshot of the Pre-K & Kindergarten and Grade 1 reading levels on Open Library.

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 their search for books that are within their reading level. The readability of a book may be scored in numerous ways, such as analyzing sentence lengths or complexity, or the percentage of words that are unique or difficult, to name a few.

For our purposes, we choose to incorporate Lexile scores—a proprietary system developed by MetaMetrics®. Lexile scores are widely used within school systems and have a reliable scoring system that is accessible and well documented.

While the goal of our initiative was to add reading levels specifically for borrowable K-12 books within the Open Library catalog, Lexile also offers a fantastic Find a Book hub where teachers, parents, and students may search more broadly for books by Lexile score. We’re grateful that Lexile features “Find in Library” links to the Open Library so readers can check nearby libraries for the books they love!

Screenshot of Lexile's Find a Book hub.

Before Reading Levels

Before Open Library had reading level scores, the system used subject tags to identify books according to grade level. Many of these categories were noisy, inaccurate, and had high overlap, making it difficult to find relevant books. Furthermore, with grade level bucketing, there was no intuitive way to search for books across a range of reading levels.

Searching for Books by Reading Level

Now, lexile score ranges like “lexile:[500 TO 900]” can be used flexibly in search queries to find the exact books that are right for a reader, with results being limited by grade levels. https://openlibrary.org/search?q=lexile%3A%5B700+TO+900%5D

Putting It All Together

By utilizing these lexile ranges, we’ve been able to develop a more coherent and expansive K-12 portal experience where there are fewer duplicate books across grade levels.

We expect this improvement will make it easier for K-12 students and teachers to find appropriate books to satisfy their reading and learning goals. You can explore the newly improved K-12 student collection at http://openlibrary.org/k-12.

What Do You Think?

Is there something you miss from the previous K-12 page? Is the new organization more useful to you? Share your thoughts on bluesky.

Credits

This reading level import initiative was led by Mek, the Open Library program lead, with assistance from Drini Cami, Open Library senior software engineer. The project received support from Jordan Frederick, an Open Library intern who shadowed this project as part of her Master’s in Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree.

Refining the Open Library Catalogue: My Internship Story

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By Jordan Frederick AKA Tauriel063 (she/her), Canada

Photo of Jordan

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 with people who already knew me, and to work with an organisation whose mission I strongly believe in. Thus, in January 2025, I started interning at Open Library with Lisa Seaberg and Mek Karpeles as my mentors. 

At the time of writing this, I am three courses away from completing my MLIS through the University of Denver, online. During my time as both a student and Open Librarian, I gained an interest in both cataloguing and working with collections. I decided to incorporate both into my internship goals, along with learning a little about scripting. Mek and Lisa had plenty of ideas for tasks I could work on, such as creating patron support videos and importing reading levels into the Open Library catalogue, which ensured that I had a well-rounded experience (and also never ran out of things to do). 

The first few weeks of my internship centered largely around building my collection, for which I chose the topic of Understanding Artificial Intelligence (AI). Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for how well-rounded the collection looks presently, as I quickly realised that my goal to learn some basic coding was more challenging than I expected. If you happen to scroll to the bottom and wonder why there are over 80 revisions to the collection, that was because I spent frustrated hours trying to get books to display using the correct codes and repeatedly failed. It is because of Mek’s and Jim Champ’s coding knowledge that the collection appears fairly robust, although I suggested many of the sections within the collection, such as “Artificial Intelligence: Ethics and Risks” and “History of Artificial Intelligence.” However, Mek has informed me that the AI collection will likely continue to receive attention by the community for the remainder of the year, as part of the project’s yearly goals. I hope to see it in much better shape by the time of our annual community celebration in October. 

Screenshot of the "Understanding Artificial Intelligence" collection. Showcases various AI books.

The Artificial Intelligence Collection. 

I successfully completed several cataloguing tasks, including adding 25 AI books to the catalogue. With the help of Scott Barnes, an engineer at the Internet Archive, I made these books readable. I also separated 36 incorrectly merged Doctor Who books and merged duplicate author and book records. Another project involved addressing bad data, where hundreds of book records had been imported into the catalogue under the category “Non renseigné,” with minimal information provided for each. While I was able to fix the previously conflated Doctor Who records, there are still over 300 records listed as “Non renseigné.” As such, this part of the project will extend beyond the scope of my internship.

Screenshot of a book record for Doctor Who - Inferno.

One of the fixed Doctor Who records.

I am particularly proud of this patron support video I created as part of my internship. It shows patrons how to create bookmarks and notes within a book they are reading, as well as how to search certain phrases or words within a book. I also created a video on how to use the audiobook feature in Open Library. Projects like these, assigned by Lisa, tie directly into my MLIS education, allowing me to put my education in meeting patrons’ needs to use. Lisa also asked me to look at the Open Library’s various “Help” pages and identify any issues such as broken links, misleading/inaccurate information, and more. This task allowed me to practice working with library documentation and to advocate for patrons’ needs by examining the pages through the perspective of a patron rather than that of a librarian.

A screenshot from the book Anne of Green Gables, used in a patron support video. There are three bookmark options on the left-hand side.

First patron support video created.

I created a survey to determine patrons’ needs and wants regarding the AI collection. This, in the library profession, is referred to as a “patron needs assessment,” which is vital when building a collection. While it would certainly have been fun for me to create a collection purely based on my own interests, there is little point in developing a collection of interest to only one person. Mek gently reminded me of this,  so I thought about how an AI collection may benefit patrons. Some potential uses for the collection I came up with were:

  • Understanding AI
  • The History of AI as a field
  • Leveraging AI for work
  • Ethics of AI

In order to determine patron perspectives on the collection, I developed a Google Forms survey, which asks questions such as: 

  • In your own words, tell us what types of books you would like to see in an AI collection (some examples might include scientific research, effects on the future, and understanding AI).
  • What are you likely to use an AI collection for (eg. academic research, understanding how to use it, light reading)?
  • Do you have any recommendations for the collection? 

Once this survey is made live, those involved in the collection will have a better idea of how to meet patrons’ needs.

While I had initially assumed that the collection would allow me to build up some collection-building skills and would hopefully benefit patrons with an interest in AI, Mek has since informed me that this collection ties in with the library’s yearly goals. In particular, the AI collection aligns with the goal of having “at least 10 librarians creating or improving custom collection pages” [2025 Planning]. Additionally, I have spent some time bulk-tagging various books (well over 100 by now), which also ties into the team’s 2025 goals. It’s gratifying to know my efforts during my internship will have far-reaching effects.

As with the AI collection, using reading levels to enhance the K-12 collection is still a work in progress. As I worked with Mek over the course of the last nine weeks, I learned more about the JSON data format than I ever knew before (which was nothing at all), what “comment out” means when running a script, and a general idea of what a key and a value are in a dictionary. So far, we’ve been able to match more than 11,000 ISBNs from Mid-Columbia library’s catalogue to readable items in the Open Library, allowing us to import reading levels for these titles and add them to the search engine.

Finally, I was offered the chance to work on my leadership skills when both Mek and Lisa asked me to lead one of our Tuesday community calls. While initially caught off guard, I  rose to the challenge and led the call successfully. I certainly fumbled a few times and had to be reminded about what order to call on people for their updates (and ironically forgot Lisa before a few community members reminded me to give her a chance to speak). But I appreciated the chance to take on a more active role in the call and may consider doing so again in the future. 

The last nine weeks have been both intense and highly educational. I am grateful I was able to complete my internship through Open Library, as I believe strongly in the organisation’s mission, enjoy working with people within its community, and intend to continue contributing for as long as possible. I would like to thank Mek and Lisa for making this internship possible and offering their guidance, Jim Champ for his help in coding the AI collection, and Scott Barnes for taking time out of his evening and weekend to assist me with JSON scripting (and patiently answering questions).

I look forward to continuing contributing to Open Library. 
If you’re interested in an even more in-depth view of the work I did during my internship, feel free to read my final paper.