Librarians Portal

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Welcome to the central hub for Librarian Resources

Getting Started

Welcome new librarians! There are at least 4 things which librarians can help with:
1. Helping create special collections and 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. Helping improve our documentation (like this page) by writing or participating in community discussion about librarian features

Guides

• 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 Out of date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 Out of date.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 Out of date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.