The Open Library Team

Open Library is made possible because of a dedicated team of staff and over 100 volunteers from around the globe. Want to join us?

In Memory Of

Aaron Swartz - Open Library Co-Founder
The Open Library wouldn't exist without Aaron. He wrote the backbone of the system you see today. He has also worked on specs like RSS, startups like Reddit.com, and software projects like web.py. He worked from San Francisco to architect the site, put together the team, and attempt to keep things organized, and we couldn't have come this far without his crucial expertise.

Active Team

Mek - Open Library Program Lead (Staff)
Citizen of the World, Open Librarian, Software Engineer

Charles Horn - Open Library Lead Data Engineer (Staff)

Drini Cami - Open Library Lead Software Engineer (Staff)

Lisa S. - Open Library Lead Community Librarian (Volunteer)

Tabish Shaikh - Open Library Software Engineer & Special Projects (Volunteer)

Advisors

Brad Rubenstein - Project Management Executive Advisor

Jessamyn C.West - Library Specialist
Jessamyn single-handedly supported the user community by answering questions and guiding users to a more enjoyable online book reading experience.

Karen Coyle - Metadata Czar
When we asked around for librarians we could trust on this project, everyone said the same thing: Karen Coyle. Coyle spent twenty years at the California Digital Library at the University of California before becoming a consultant. She's written papers on everything from catalog cards to RDF and her encyclopedic knowledge of the field is invaluable in designing our system.

Supporting Staff

Alexis Rossi - Internet Archive, Director of Collections & Open Library Co-Founder
Rossi has worked as a news content manager at ClariNet, the first online news aggregator, as editorial director at Alexa Internet, and in the collections group at Internet Archive. She squeezed data from publishers, code from programmers, and made sure all the servers ran on time. Alexis facilitated the first meeting where the Open Library was born.

Jude Coelho - Books Digitization & Process Manager
Jude coordinates and translates the needs and wants of 33 global digitization centers into actionable projects for the technical team. He also writes code.

Brenton Cheng - Internet Archive UX Team Manager

Brewster Kahle - Internet Archive Founder, Open Library Co-Founder
Kahle is the founder of WAIS, Alexa Internet, and Internet Archive, which he currently runs. He oversees the project, flies around the country promoting it, and cuts (some of) the checks.

Giovanni Damiola - Internet Archive Senior Software Engineer & Former Open Library Tech Lead
Lead engineer, Giovanni keeps Open Library up and running.

Former developers & Alumni

Tom Morris - Software engineer with interests in search, MARC, and internationalization. Ex-internationalization lead.

Anand Chitipothu - Lead Engineer
Anand received his Masters in Computational Science from the Indian Institute of Science before becoming technical leader at Strand Life Sciences. Working full-time for Open Library from India, he is in charge of development for Infobase, our database system, and Infogami, our wiki software, and takes part in building many other pieces.

Raj Kumar - Engineer
Raj writes open source software for the book scanning, BookServer, Open Library, and Petabox projects.

Mike McCabe - Engineer

Mike Ang - BookReader Engineer
An engineer by trade and artist by aspiration, Michael came to the Internet Archive to further its goal of Universal Access To All Knowledge. In addition to a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada, Michael holds a Master's Degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and sports more than a few battle scars from Bay Area and Canadian startup companies. Michael developed the Internet Archive's online BookReader and Open Library lending system. The open source BookReader software is now used by the Library of Congress and other libraries.

Lance Arthur - HTML & Pixel Wrangler
Lance has been running around virtually naked on the web since 1996. His personal site was instrumental in influencing the first generation of web designers to explore the limits of web design while he honed his writing skills by exposing way too much information about himself. He is happy his last name begins with A.

Ariel Backenroth - Programmer
Ariel received his degree in Computer Science at Rice University. Most recently he comes from Metaweb Technologies where he was the lead engineer on the user interface for freebase, another massive open database.

Edward Betts - Chief Data Munger
Edward has a long and storied career importing data for everything from travel agencies to television networks. And, when he comes home at night, he has a side project: importing data from recipe sites. So we're lucky to have him on our team, managing our monumental collection of data importing tasks.

Winnie Chen - QA Master
Winnie discovered Mosiac while doing research to finish up a degree in Radio/TV from San Francisco State University. Between school, friends and community got sucked into the world wide web around 1993-1994. Around the same time I did an internship with Clement Mok and began working at various agencies (Organic Online, Razorfish, Frog Design, Fleischman Hillard, Interbrand). Currently attending San Jose State University's School of Information and Library Science part-time.

Daniel Giffin - Programmer
After a career moving between computer science academia and computer science startups, Giffin was in charge of importing catalog data, as he worked for Open Library from New York. He designed our basic schema and wrote the initial importers for Library of Congress and other publisher data. He is now doing computer science research at Stanford University.

Noufal Ibrahim - Engineer
Noufal is a freelance consultant and trainer based out of Bangalore who worked on the back end of the website. He is an active member of the Python programming language community in India and abroad.

Rebecca Malamud - Designer
Malamud is the design genius behind media.org, invisible.net, mappa.mundi.net, betterdogfood.com, resource.org, and dozens of other brilliantly named and designed sites. She works from Sixes, Oregon.

Robert Miller - Global Director of Books
Robert manages the global books division. He wishes he had more time for pleasure reading!

George Oates - Project Lead, Designer
George has worked on the web since 1996. Before she joined the Open Library team, she was responsible for creating the Flickr Commons (flickr.com/commons) and was the award-winning lead designer of Flickr itself. Before that, she designed all sorts of web applications, from a booking system for a ballooning company to the public face of a bank in Australia.

solrize - Search Programmer
One day, some other Archive people were trying to write a program using rm, the Unix utility to delete things, when they checked its man page. They quickly spun around. "Hey Paul," they asked. "Did you write rm?" "Oh yeah," Paul Rubin replied, with a dismissive wave of his hand. "But that was a long time ago." Paul worked from Internet Archive's offices in San Francisco to build our search engine and help with importing.

Community Contributors

A.S.L. Devi - contributed the AJAX autocomplete and other fun features.

Werner Popken - contributed to the German translations and testing our i18n user interface.

Tommi Raivio - contributed our review system.

Allan Jardine - developed dataTables, and helped integrate some new features just for Open Library.

Simon Chetrit - photographed the image we use on the home page.