Open Library Search Tips

General Search

• title:flammable will find any books with "flammable" in the title field
  
• author:solnit will find authors with "solnit" in their name
  
• subject:tennis rules will find any books about "tennis" AND "rules"
  
• place:lisbon will find books about Lisbon
  
• person:rosa parks will look for people with rosa AND parks in their name
  
• language:spa will find any books with at least one edition in Spanish (most other language codes use the first three letters of the language except for Japanese which uses jpn There is also mul for multiple languages and und for undetermined)
  
• publisher:harper will looks for any books published by a publisher with "harper" in their name. (Publisher has never been a controlled field in the library world, so you can see we have a ton of variants of this famous publisher in the search facets.)

You can also blend them together:

• subject:travel place:istanbul will look for books about travel in Istanbul.
  
• subject:dogs subject:("Juvenile fiction" OR "Juvenile literature") will look for children's books about dogs.

Or use date ranges (there's no UI for this yet):

• first_publish_year:[1200 TO 1400] will show you all the books published between 1200 & 1400 .

You can also search the special field that has everything dumped into it without any stemming:

• title_suggest:"vitamin a"

Other interesting searches, mainly useful for librarians looking for data

• subject:horror AND edition_count:1 - Find horror works with exactly 1 edition
  
• subject:horror AND NOT author_key:* - Find horror works without an author

Classifications

You can also search by classification; this feature was introduced recently (Aug 2020), so there might still be some kinks to work out, and there might be changes to how things work. It currently support both dewey decimal and library of congress classifications. Found an issue? Let us know by creating an issue on GitHub!

Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC)

See the index of DDC classes

• ddc:200* - matches e.g. 200, 200.25, 200.21 B, etc.
  
• ddc:2* - matches e.g. 200, 234, 200.25, etc. It does not match e.g. 002.5
  
• ddc:[150 TO 160] - (inclusive) matches e.g. 150, 150.5, 155 160, 160.51, etc.

Library of Congress Classification (LCC)

See the index of LCC classes

• lcc:A* - matches e.g. A123, AC123.5C12, A, etc.
  
• lcc:B--* - matches e.g. B123, B3, B, etc. It does not match e.g. BC123
  
• lcc:[B TO C] - (inclusive) matches e.g. B, B123, C, etc. It does not match e.g. C1

Author Search

• birth_date:1973 will find any authors born in 1973

Subject Search

• rome type:place will find you subjects about Rome that relate to the city; the place. Other types are time & person.

Search API

Are you interested in getting back JSON data? Just change /search? to /search.json? in your url! Learn more about the Open Library Search API.