We invite you to introduce yourself

My name is John Rigdon. I'd like to encourage you to introduce yourself here and tell us a bit about how you use Open Library and what you'd like to see.

For myself I use OL as a reference bibliography when researching - primarily the American Civil War, but any kind of history is of interest. I'd like to see a robust book review and ranking organized around users recommendations that is open source and free for others to reference and update.

My name is Jessamyn West. You may have seen me making some edits to the FAQ recently. I've been doing a lot of the email support for OL on a volunteer basis. I'm a librarian who lives in Vermont and I'm the Director of Operations for MetaFilter.com. I use OL to find neat old images and for answering reference questions on Ask MetaFilter and for nosing around old books. I hadn't really used the lending library until I started helping other people use it. If people have questions about how support's been working (I have a nice short list of bugs, for example), feel free to email me. My first name at gmail.

Hi. I'm Karen Coyle. I was involved early on in the Open Library project, mainly helping the OL designers and programmers understand library data (MARC, cataloging rules, etc.). My current interests are in getting library data more visible on the Web, either as linked data or as anything else that helps people move from online searching to library resources.

I'm Tom Morris (@tfmorris, not the other one who runs in some of the same circles). I'm interested in books, data, and rich connections among things. I'm interested in seeing OpenLibrary become a viable source of richly connected data about books and authors. I've worked extensively with Freebase and am interested in using Freebase & OpenLibrary to enhance and correct each other's data so it becomes the best of both worlds.

I'm Nicolás Tamargo (or reosarevok, or reotab). I work for MusicBrainz, which obviously means I <3 open data. I haven't used OL much yet, but I'm certainly interested in seeing an open data alternative to Goodreads and the like grow (and hopefully in seeing open data, OL and MB and any others, actively used in libraries at some point). And, you know, I like being around other data nerds, too, so I think I'll try to stick around :)

I'm Tom Johnson (@no_reply). I'm a "Digital Applications Librarian" at Oregon State University. I write software in Python and Ruby (and sometimes Java, PHP, ...) for digital collections management, scholarly communications, and Linked (Library) Data. I see OL as an important source of resources for libraries; and, potentially, a key piece of OpenGLAM infrastructure.