Developer Center

Welcome to Open Library's Developer Center.

Accessing Open Library Data

Open Library offers free public APIs and [Monthly Bulk Data Dumps] for accessing catalog data.

APIs

• Covers
  
• Books
  
• API Sandbox

Monthly Data Dumps

• Bulk Download Open Library Bibliographic Data

API Client Libraries

• [The official Open Library Client (Python)][https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-client]
  
• Ruby interface for the API, written by Jay Fajardo

Friends Using Open Library APIs

If you are using Open Library's [[APIs|OL APIs]], please email openlibrary@archive.org and let us know about how you are using them.

• OpenBook Wordpress Plugin by John Miedema
  Use the Open Library JSON API to inserts a book cover, title, author, and publisher in WordPress blogs.

• Evergreen OpenLibrary added content plug-in by David Christensen and Dan Scott
  Uses the OpenLibrary JSON API to display book covers and tables of contents as part of the item display in the Evergreen open-source library system.

• Link to full text by Ted Lawless
  Uses the OpenLibrary JSON API to dynamically insert links to full text titles into a library OPAC.

Contributing to Open Library

Getting Started

• Set up a development instance of Open Library
  
• Github Issue Tracker (old issue tracker on launchpad)
  
• Git Cheat Sheet: Committing changes to github.com/openlibrary/openlibrary (previously [/dev/docs/committing])

Writing Bots

• Writing a Bot for Open Library (legacy bot docs)

About the Technology

Open Library is powered by Infogami, a clean, simple wiki application framework built on web.py. Unlike other wikis, Infogami has the flexibility to handle different classes of data, including structured data. That makes it the perfect platform for Open Library.

Open Library also uses a text-to-HTML formatting language Markdown, created by John Gruber. We also use the handy WMD Markdown WYSIWYG editor.

• Infogami Developer Tutorial

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Open Library graciously uses Browserstack for cross browser compatibility testing, Github for hosting our public code repository, and Travis CI + Github Actions.