Open Library in Every Language

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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

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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

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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!

Extending a Warm Welcome to New Patrons

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By Sabreen Parveen with Ray Berger & Mek

A Forward from the Mentors

For book lovers who use openlibrary.org every day, it may be easy to forget what it felt like to visit the website for the first time. Some features which some were able to learn the hard way — through trial and error — may not be as easy or intuitive for others to understand. We feel like we’ve failed each time a patron leaves the library, frustrated, and before even having the chance to understand the value it may provide to them.

At Open Library, we strive to design a service which is accessible and easy for anyone to use and understand. We understand that everyone has different experiences and usability needs. Our mission is to make books as accessible and useful to the public as possible, and we’re unable to do this if patrons aren’t given the opportunity and resources to learn how our services work.

After polling dozens of patrons on video calls and through surveys, we started to get a good idea about which aspects of the website are most confusing to new patrons. The most common question was, “what is Open Library and what does it let you do?”. We tried to search for a clear explanation on our homepage, but there wasn’t one — just rows of books we assumed patrons would click on and somehow understand how it all worked. We also received useful questions concerning which books on Open Library are readable, borrowable, or what is meant when a book shows as unavailable or not in the library. We also received questions about how the Reading Log works. We decided to address some of these frequently asked questions at the earliest possible entry point: on our home page with a new Onboarding Carousel. Leading this project was 2021 Open Library Fellow, Sabreen, with the mentorship of Ray & Mek. We’re so excited and proud to showcase Sabreen’s hard work to you!

Designing a Simple-to-use Onboarding Experience

By Sabreen Parveen

This summer I got this amazing opportunity to work with the Internet Archive as an Open Library Fellow where I contributed to the Onboarding Project.

My Journey with Open Library

I decided to join the Open Library community in 2020 because I was interested in contributing to an open source project and improving my abilities as a programmer and designer. Several things about Open Library stuck out to me while I was browsing projects on github. Firstly, I had the knowledge of the languages and frameworks it used. Secondly the documentation was very clear and easy to understand. Thirdly, the issue tracker contained many exciting ways for me to help. Most importantly the project had an active community and hosted calls every week where I could work with others and ask questions. Once I had familiarized myself with the project, I joined Open Library’s public gitter chatroom and asked questions about getting started. Shortly after, I attended my first community call, received a Slack invite, and later that week submitted my first contribution! I have joined almost all the community calls since. Gradually I started solving more and more issues, many of them related to web accessibility and SEO. I also started creating graphics for Open Library’s “monthly reads” pages. The community must have been excited about my contributions, because this year I was invited to be a 2021 Open Library Fellow and to team up with a mentor to lead a flexible, high-impact project to completion.

Selecting a Project: Onboarding Flow

The project I chose for my 2021 Open Library Fellowship was to add a new user onboarding experience to Openlibrary.org homepage to help new patrons get an overview of the website and how to use its features.

The problem

First time visitors to OpenLibrary.org often report getting confused because they don’t know how to use the service. We had several indicators this was the case:

  • From my own experience, I had been confused when I first started using the website. I didn’t know what the “Want to read button” does? I came to know about the list feature while solving an issue.
  • Bounce Rate: Open Library has a fairly high bounce rate, which is a measure of percentage of people who visit a website and leave without continuing to the other pages. We wondered if this is because patrons were confused about how to use the website and so we wanted to test this.
  • Feedback: We received this feedback from patrons emailing us about their experience

So by adding onboarding flow many of the users will get an insight of what the website actually does.

Implementation

While designing user onboarding, we wanted to create a system that was interactive, contextual, and easy to use and understand. As a result, we decided to start by adding an onboarding carousel to the homepage, the most common place patrons would land on when visiting the website for the first time. We designed the carousel to feature five cards: Read Free Library Books Online, Keep Track of Your Favourite Books, Try the virtual library explorer, Be an Open Librarian and Feedback form to receive feedback from the visitors. 

We  decided on a carousel as the format because they’re

  • non-interruptive.
  • persistent, unlike other onboarding design patterns that only show up upon signup and are never seen again.
  • easy to explore.

When clicked, each card redirects patrons to a FAQs page. In an upcoming version, the “keep track of your favourite books” card will instead trigger an onboarding modal with a step-by-step tutorial containing several slides explaining how we can add a book to our reading log, create a new list and view your reading log. Each feature is explained using a GIF, which is short and descriptive. You can close the modal at any step and any time. The modal creation was a long process of discussions and feedback, but finally we came up with a simple and attractive modal.

During implementation we kept following things in our mind:

  • The icons for the home page cards. Their resemblance with the text.
  • Eye catchy and easy to understand captions
  • Links the card will redirect people to (currently FAQs page)
  • GIFs should be contextual.
  • Modal design should be such that the main focus should be on the GIF and not the modal itself. Also easy navigation between the slides was necessary.

Design Process

To make this project successful, we had weekly meetings and discussions in the community channel to get everyone’s opinion. Designs were mocked up using Figma. I also had the chance to present my ideas before the Internet Archive’s product team. We used feedback from these meetings to review our previous decisions, our progress, and inform next steps. 

Results

  • Alexa: The bounce rate is now reduced to 38.2%.
  • Google Analytics: More than 5000 engagements with these cards.
  • Infrastructure to continue building from which we can re-use in other situations. 

Next Steps

  • Doodles to bring more character to the homepage cards
  • Include pop-up tutorials for more of the cards (other than just Reading Log + Lists)
  • Ability to hide / show the carousel (for patrons who have already received the information) 

My experience

I had a pretty good time working with experienced mentors Mek and Raymond Berger. They were very supportive during the entire program. Sometimes we spent our meeting time finding solutions to some problems together. Additionally, I learned more about project management and clarifying a plan by breaking issues into manageable steps. I got to spend time learning about new industry tools like Figma, which we used for presenting designs and Google Analytics for tracking key metrics. I also gained a deeper understanding of user experience. I learned to design by thinking as a patron of Open Library, what would she or he want? Will it be useful or easy to understand? I appreciated the flexibility of the Open Library Fellowship program, there was no pressure on me so that I could focus on my studies also. We tried to have clear next steps and homeworks at the end of each of our calls. The calls helped clarify what we were hoping to accomplish and provided direction and feedback. Finally, having the community available for regular feedback was really useful for tuning our designs.

About the OpenLibrary Fellowship Program

The Internet Archive’s Open Library Fellowship is a flexible, self-designed independent study which pairs volunteers with mentors to lead develop of a high impact feature for OpenLibrary.org. Most fellowship programs last one to two months and are flexible, according to the availability of contributors. We typically choose fellows based on their exemplary and active participation, conduct, and performance working within the Open Library community. The Open Library staff typically only accepts 1 or 2 fellows at a time to ensure participants receive plenty of support and mentor time. If you’re interested in volunteering as an Open Library Fellow and receiving mentorship, you can apply using this form or email openlibrary@archive.org for more information.

The Open Book Genome Project

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We’ve all heard the advice, don’t judge a book by its cover. But then how should we go about identifying books which are good for us? The secret depends on understanding two things:

  1. What is a book?
  2. What are our preferences?

We can’t easily answer the second question without understanding the first one. But we can help by being good library listeners and trying to provide tools, such as the Reading Log and Lists, to help patrons record and discover books they like. Since everyone is different, the second question is key to understanding why patrons like these books and making Open Library as useful as possible to patrons.

What is a book?

As we’ve explored before, determining whether something is a book is a deceptively difficult task, even for librarians. It’s a bound thing made of paper, right? But what about audiobooks and ebooks? Ok, books have ISBNs right? But many formats can have ISBNs and books published before 1967 won’t have one. And what about yearbooks? Is a yearbook a book? Is a dictionary a book? What about a phonebook? A price guide? An atlas? There are entire organizations, like the San Francisco Center for the Book, dedicated to exploring and pushing the limits of the book format.

In some ways, it’s easier to answer this question about humans than books because every human is built according to a specific genetic blueprint called DNA. We all have DNA, what make us unique are the variations of more than 20,000 genes that our DNA are made of, which help encode for characteristics like hair and eye color. In 1990, an international research group called the Human Genome Project (HGP) began sequencing the human genome to definitively uncover, “nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being”. The result, which completed in 2003, was a compelling answer of, “what is a human?”.

Nine years later, Will Glaser & Tim Westergren drew inspiration from HGP and launched a similar effort called the Music Genome Project, using trained experts to classify and label music according to a taxonomy of characteristics, like genre and tempo. This system became the engine which powers song recommendations for Pandora Radio.

Circa 2003, Aaron Stanton, Matt Monroe, Sidian Jones, and Dan Bowen adapted the idea of Pandora to books, creating a book recommendation service called BookLamp. Under the hood, they devised a Book Genome Project which combined computers and crowds to “identify, track, measure, and study the multitude of features that make up a book”.

Their system analyzed books and surfaced insights about their structure, themes, age-appropriateness, and even pace, bringing us withing grasping distance of the answer to our question: What is a book?

BookLamps-Theme-Currents-for-Carrie

Sadly, the project did not release their data, was acquired by Apple in 2014, and subsequently discontinued. But they left an exciting treasure map for others to follow.

And follow, others did. In 2006, a project called the Open Music Genome Project attempted to create a public, open, community alternative to Pandora’s Music Genome Project. We thought this was a beautiful gesture and a great opportunity for Open Library; perhaps we could facilitate public book insights which any project in the ecosystem could use to create their own answer for, “what is a book?”. We also found inspiration from complimentary projects like StoryGraph, which elegantly crowd sources book tags from patrons to help you, “choose your next book based on your mood and your favorite topics and themes”, HaithiTrust Research Center (HTRC) which has led the way in making book data available to researchers, and the Open Syllabus Project which is surfacing useful academic books based on their usage across college curriculum.

Introducing the Open Book Genome Project

Over the last several months, we’ve been talking to communities, conducting research, speaking with some of the teams behind these innovative projects, and building experiments to shape a non-profit adaptation of these approaches called the Open Book Genome Project (OBGP).

Our hope is that this Open Book Genome Project will help responsibly make book data more useful and accessible to the public: to power book recommendations, to compare books based on their similarities and differences, to produce more accurate summaries, to calculate reading levels to match audiences to books, to surface citations and urls mentioned within books, and more.

OBGP hopes to achieve these things by employing a two pronged approach which readers may continue learning about in following two blog posts:

  1. The Sequencer – a community-engineered bot which reads millions of Internet Archive books and extracts key insights for public consumption.
  2. Community Reviews – a new crowd-sourced book tagging system which empowers readers to collaboratively classify & share structured reviews of books.

Or hear an overview of the OBGP in this half-hour tech talk: