Happy holidays & Happy New Year, readers! We are thrilled to announce 2018 has been an unprecedented year for openlibrary.org and a great time to be a book-lover. Without skipping a beat, we can honestly say we owe our progress to you, our dedicated community of volunteer developers, designers, and librarians. We hope you’ll join us in celebrating as we recap our 2018 achievements:
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Google Summer of Code 2018
This is Internet Archive’s second year participating in Google Summer of Code, but for Open Library, it’s an exciting first. Open Library’s mission is to create, “a web page for every book” and this summer, we’re fortunate to team with Salman Shah to advance this mission. Salman’s Google Summer of Code roadmap aims to targets two core needs of openlibrary.org: modernizing and increasing the coverage of its book catalog and improving website reliability.
Star Ratings are Here!
Over the last six months, more than 145,000 of you have tracked which books you want-to-read. Now you can record how you feel about the books you’ve finished reading using star ratings!
Next time you’re on a book page, you’ll see 5-stars beneath the book cover. By clicking one of the 5 stars, you can select the corresponding rating for this book. Your ratings are private by default, though we do intend to offer an option for making your ratings public. Also, while it’s not finished yet, we are working on adding average star ratings to our books pages so you can learn how the community feels about different titles.
Turn Your Website into a Library
Openlibrary.org has over 3M books lining its digital shelves, but nothing quite beats being able to embed your favorite book directly on your personal site. Last week, with the help of volunteer Galen Mancino, we launched an embed tool which lets you add any Open Library book to your website or blog. Next time you write a book review, you can place its Open Library book right next to it and, if its available, enable your audience to read it with a single click.
Celebrating 20 Years of the Internet Archive with an Open Library Feature Bonanza
To celebrate the Internet Archive’s 20th anniversary, the Open Library team has added pages for 200,000 new modern works and rolled out a brigade of fixes and features to improve our user experience.
Over the past year, Open Library’s digital librarian Jessamyn West and lead engineer Brenton Cheng have worked tirelessly with the engineering team and volunteer community to outline a roadmap for revitalizing Open Library and address the issues most affecting our users. We’re proud to announce progress on several fronts, including social sharing, improved book lending, a mobile-optimized book reader, full-text search, a new developer tool, and the addition of thousands of new modern works.