Open Librarians Portal

Home | About Librarianship | Becoming an Open Librarian | Librarian Issue Tracker | Bookmarklets | Sandbox (old wiki-editing playground)

Welcome to the central hub for Librarian Resources!

This page is for:
1. Community members to learn more about contributing edits to pages on Open Library.
2. Learning how to apply to join the Open Librarians-In-Training community and ways to help out.
3. Educating Open Librarians (after training) how to use Librarian tools and permissions.

If you are not yet an Open Librarian-In-Training, you probably want to start here:

https://openlibrary.org/librarians-in-training

Getting Started

Welcome librarians! There are at least 4 ways librarians can help:

1. Creating a special collection of book carousels or themed lists
   
2. Merging or fixing conflated works & authors
   
3. Editing & fixing catalog entries (or enhancing them by adding info like "series" or "reading level")
   
4. Writing & improving our documentation (like this current page)

Check here for lots of opportunities to fix metadata!

Guides

• Creating Special Collections - How you can create your own special collections which show up on openlibrary.org/collections.
  
• Basic Editing of Authors, Works, & Editions - addresses the most common questions about editing metadata on Open Library. This guide applies to all contributors and is not specific to those with special librarian permissions.
  
• Merging Authors, Works, & Editions - how to combine duplicate records on Open Library.
  
• Internationalization - Everything you need to translate the Open Library website into other languages.

Librarian Resources

• FAQ (partial duplicate). This page resolves the most common questions about Open Library asked by an Open Library contributor. It should not contain specific information for librarians.
  
• Works and Edition Metadata. A list (with examples) of field assignments for Works and Editions in Open Library database.
  
• Metadata Standards & Formats on GitHub
  
• FRBRization by Karen Coyle
  
• Overview of Identifiers on GitHub
  
• Metadata Schema (2019)
  
• Library of Congress
  
• Infogami / Dublin Core Metadata Mapping
  
• Librarian Jargon Definitions
  
• Catalog Implementation (2010)

Historical

• Librarian Guidelines. Out of date
  
• Adding books to open library (manually). Out of date. Information already included in Editing and FAQ. There are several pages with some interesting pages/information to keep/merge: Using subjects and Open Library search cheats.
  
• Open Library's Data Schema Table. Out of date

Third-Party Resources

• "Open Library and Librarianship" (PDF) by Zomuana Joute. A paper concerned about defining an open library, its technology, components, what it will have and provide with respect to the case study of www.openlibrary.

Adding Librarians

Promoting librarians can only be done by a staff administrator or the Lead Community Librarian.