About the People

A small and dedicated team built the Open Library demo:

[[/user/anand|Anand Chitipothu]], Chief Web Programmer. 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 was in charge of development for ThingDB, our database system, and Infogami, our wiki software, and took part in building many of the other pieces.

[[/user/edward|Edward Betts]], Chief Data Munger. Working from London, 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.

solrize, Programmer. One day when I was working across the table from Paul, some other people in the building were trying to write a program using rm, the Unix utility to delete things, when they checked the man page. They quickly spun around. "Hey Paul," they asked. "Did you write rm?" "Oh yeah," Paul 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.

[[/user/webchick|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 worked from Sixes, Oregon to make the Open Library site look good.

[[/user/kcoyle|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 has been invaluable in designing our system.

[[/user/aaronsw|Aaron Swartz]], Leader. Swartz has 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.

Brewster Kahle, Overseer. Kahle is the founder of WAIS, Alexa Internet, and Internet Archive, which he currently runs. He oversaw the project, flew around the country promoting it, and cut the checks.

Contributors

[[/user/tommi|Tommi Raivio]] contributed our review system.

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

Alumni

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.

[[/user/alexis|Alexis Rossi]], Manager. 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.