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Welcome!

Open Library and its 1.5M users are so grateful you're here!

Current Bots

1. New York Times Bot

Maintainer: None

2. Cathar Bot

Maintainer: Charles(@hornc)

3. IA-Wishlist Bot

• Maintainer: Salman Shah(@salman-bhai)
• Documentation: IA Wishlist Bot

4. ONIX Bot

• Maintainer: Salman Shah(@salman-bhai)
• Documentation: ONIX-Bot

Goals for the Open Library Bots

In progress:

• Importing ONIX Records for Open Library.
• Adding books from the Internet Archive Wishlist.
• Importing all previous bots from Open Library

Future Plans

• Make Open Library Bots much more convenient to use for ordinary librarians.

You might also consider trying the openlibrary-client Python tool which provides convenience methods for downloading book, author, list, and subject data.

Applying for a bot account

Follow these 2 steps to apply for a privileged bot account:

1. First, register a new OpenLibary account which meets the following guidelines: (a) Your bot account should be different from your personal OpenLibrary account and (b) the username of your new account should end with the word "Bot" (e.g. WorkBot, ImportBot). These conventions allow us to monitor / filter through Recent Changes by bots to identify only those changes made by bot accounts. (Since bots tend to repeat the same small operation with high frequency, they would overwhelm the list if shown alongside edits by humans.)

2. Open a github issue and ask a site admin (e.g. @mekarpeles, as of 2018) to set your account to have bot privileges and to add your account to the "API" usergroup

openlibrary-client Library

• Instead of making POSTs to API endpoints directly using a bot account, the OpenLibrary community has created an official python client library called openlibrary-client which streamlines the process of making metadata updates and writing bots. Bots used to be written using the http://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/blob/master/openlibrary/api.py library, but this has been deprecated in favor of the much easier (and safer) openlibrary-client.

• Click here for instructions on installing and using the openlibrary-client.

Bot account Etiquette

If possible, bot accounts should not be used directly to make 1-off changes, e.g. from the command line. Changes instead should be coded into bot scripts (i.e. bots) and checked in to the openlibrary-bots repository. This way we can look back in time and see/figure out what exact changes were made (so we can debug if something goes wrong or if we have to modify or update and re-apply the logic).

How Do We Communicate?

• What are the actions being taken and who is working on what? Ask to join our slack channel.
• Tuesday Community Calls. There's also a digital meeting every Tuesday AM PST where everyone checks in and touches base. The link for that call is here, we look to see you there.