Category Archives: Events

Celebrating Our Community in 2025

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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:

2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020

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. 

Save the Date: 2025 Open Library Community Celebration 

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Each year since 2020, we’ve hosted a virtual celebration to honor the many global contributors who make the Open Library project possible and continuously improve the experience for our patrons. 

This year’s Open Library Community Celebration will be held virtually on Tuesday, Nov. 4, at 9 a.m. PDT. 

Volunteers, staff, patrons and friends of the library are invited to RSVP here to get the link.

Last year was marked by more than 500,000 books being removed from the library, cyber security attacks, and power outages. Our response has been to focus on doing more with less: making the books we have more useful, making our contributors more effective, and targeting our efforts to the underserved communities who rely on our services most.

Celebrate with us as we present:  

  • Personal success stories
  • New improvements for our library patrons
  • A sneak peek at our 2026 roadmap
  • Open Library’s strategic path forward

Also, check out previous years’ community celebrations to learn more about other recent victories: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020.

Looking forward to inviting you to this year’s celebration!

Book Talks: Watch Virtual Talks by Trailblazing Authors

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by Nick Norman & Mek

In an ongoing series, the Internet Archive hosts renowned authors of the digital humanities and beyond for virtual book talks that are free and open to the public.

Graphic credit: Urja Upadhyaya

For nearly a decade, the Internet Archive has hosted events at its headquarters in San Francisco, occasionally welcoming forward-thinking authors of give presentations about their recent books in the digital humanities.

The COVID pandemic has been a catalyst for change, both in the types of challenges facing our communities and how we may address them. In 2020, many libraries were required to close their doors, leaving many authors without important venues for connecting with their audiences. Many patrons have increasingly turned to their screens for access to trusted voices from the safety and convenience of their homes. Organizations like ours have also adapted by running more digital events. For instance, did you know that since 2020, the Internet Archive has commissioned more than 200 artists to perform live Essential Music Concerts From Home? We invite you to browse their recorded performances.

Over this past year, in an effort to support authors and to help patrons access trusted voices, Chris Freeland, Director of the Open Libraries initiative, has helped cultivate the Internet Archive’s Book Talks series. This ongoing series features more than a dozen trailblazing authors, such as Harvard University Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig, author of, “They Don’t Represent Us” and Rachel Ignotofsky, the author of “The History of the Computer“.

Best of all, you can access the complete collection of book talks for free though the library at openlibrary.org/booktalks, or by clicking the “Book Talks” tab under the “Browse” drop-down menu on OpenLibrary.org.

Stay Up To Date

Photo credit: Chris Freeland

Want to learn about upcoming virtual book talks hosted by the Internet Archive?

Sign up here to get updates delivered to your inbox.

Is there a Book Talk you enjoyed watching? Is there an author you’d like to see featured for a future Book Talk? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section below

Authors & Researchers

Are you an author or researcher in the digital humanities that may like to present about your most recent book? Please reach out to chrisfreeland@archive.org. If you’re a researcher that has benefited from the Internet Archive’s research material, please use this form let us know!