Documentation

Open Library Documentation Guide

Documentation Lead: @RayBB

Welcome to the Open Library documentation guide. Whether you're searching for information related to Solr or wondering where to contribute new content, this document provides a comprehensive overview of our documentation sources and guidelines.

Search for Documentation

When looking for information within Open Library's documentation, you have several options.

Lets look at some example to search for "solr":

• Open Library GitHub Repo (checked in files)
  • Full text search in your IDE or use GitHub UI
  • Can filter for *.md files
• Open Library GitHub search issues, PRs, commits, etc
  • The advanced UI as linked above or the general like this
• OpenLibrary GitHub Wiki, example
  • You can also clone this repo for local search:
    • git clone https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary.wiki.git
  • Unfortunately, since this wiki is publicly editable it is not indexed by search engines. See more here.
• Internet Archive's GitHub org (spanning repos), example similar to above including:
  • open-library-client, openlibrary-bots, openlibrary-librarians
• Google Docs (especially Community Call notes)
  • Not sure if there is a way for the public to search across them but Staff can
• OpenLibrary.org pages, which doesn't have an easy way to search but you can use Google filters like this
• blog.openlibrary.org - for announcements and such, example
• Some things may be buried in Internet Archive videos, which, I'm not sure how to search
• Slack - has lots of historical info
• Gitter - Not sure how far back search goes

Where to Contribute New Content

• Is it closely related to code? In the repo
• Is it focused on readers of Open Library? openlibrary.org
• Is it related to onboarding, how things work, etc? Put it in the GitHub Wiki
• Does it require a lot of collaboration? Maybe Google Docs