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:
Tag Archives: Community
Raising Crypto for the Greater Good
Open Library is raising 50 Ethereum (ETH) to get books our readers love! Chip-in and help us democratize our bookshelves for all.
If you donate now, WeTrust Spring will match your individual ETH donation 100% (until they’ve hit $100k), through Giving Tuesday, Nov. 27!
In 2006, Aaron Swartz founded Open Library with the vision of creating “one web page for every book ever published”. Over the last twelve years, a lot has changed. Open Library has matured not only into a book catalog spanning 25M editions and 16M unique works, but into a library initiative recognized by the state of California, under the auspices of the Internet Archive. Today, Open Library makes over 3M of Internet Archive’s digital books (2.3M public access, 800k modern borrowable) readable directly from your browser. Last year, over 1.3M books were lent to readers from openlibrary.org.
25,000 emails in three years
A slightly more personal note here… it’s been a little over three years since I started working at Open Library and just this past week we hit a milestone of 25,000 emails sent. That’s slightly lower than the number of emails we get because some are just saying “Thank you!” and some we forward to other departments and yes, a few are spam. But the rest–the tech support, the early book returns, the reference questions, the merge requests–have been answered by me and Michelle and Laurel.
February 1-5 is #ColorOurCollections Week
There are a lot of neat public domain images in our collections. We’ve highlighted them in the past and continue to encourage people to use, remix and share our content. This week for the #ColorOurCollections event, we’ve pulled out some especially colorable images and made them into PDFs that you can print out and color. We’ve created a few pairs of images we think you’ll like. Here are the images and links to the books where you can find and download even more. If you just want to download a zip file of all eight images, click here.
- Outlines from the figures and compositions upon the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan vases of the late Sir William Hamilton (download printable PDF images: one, two)
It’s Aaron Swartz Day – Here’s an Open Library status report
Next week is the third annual Aaron Swartz Day (2013, 2014), a celebration and Hackathon which takes place at the Internet Archive on November 7th. Please consider joining us. More information about this year’s events can be found here. We have a lot of good news on our end.
