This week we welcomed our first guest speaker, Mr. Mek Karpeles from Internet Archive and Open Library. Mek’s presentation offered us great details into what motivated the foundation of Open Library, how it works, how it contributes to knowledge dissemination and makes a further difference in the society. I haven’t have similar chance to have such a close look into the industry before so it is definitely a great event. For the second part of this blog, I would talk about practical tasks namely my personal routine contributions.

Thoughts on Open Library

There are three things that left me with great impression during Mek’s talk.

The first one is about Mek’s own experience of building the Open Library. He mentioned that at the very beginning, there was only him, though now they have a fantastic team. It is rather a cliche talking about everything starts at the very small first step, and it is understandable, but hearing someone sharing that face to face still impressed me a lot. It needs intelligence to find the flaw in everyday system, but it may need more courage to start fixing it oneself.

Moving on to the Open Library itself, I didn’t know it is based on a true physical national library, I didn’t know it is that “official”, so when Mek introduced that, it more or less shocked me. Of course, in this case, many doubts are eliminated. For example, as maybe the most essential, the source of books as well as the quality of books are more guaranteed, the reputation of Open Source is enhanced, and there could be more funds. At the same time, from my personal perspective, this may helps to attract more readers and also holds reader’s loyalty. For me, I would be more willing to borrow online from a website of a library which in physical form makes me have connection to. For example, if I know there is such a library in physical, I see its building, its furnishing, see how the light is shed on book shelves, no matter in person or online, I may have an emotional connection to this place. And when I borrow book from an online library of it, it would feel like I am indeed borrowing from that very library which realize that emotional connection. This experience differs a lot from just visiting a stand-alone online library.

The last thing is that it is inspiring to realize having such online libraries help to preserve knowledge. Nowadays we are enjoying the convenience that online reading has brought us. But it is also true that something, some paper that will vanish ages later would be preserved in this way. Meanwhile, I personally believe it would be also meaningful for such online library to preserve readers’ reading experience. It helps track people’s behaviors in different decades, for example, when we are facing COVID-19. And perhaps there would be more revolutionary ways to store information in the future, as today we still need physical databases, but that is another story.

In conclusion, it is always a glad thing seeing knowledge being transmitted in faster, wider ways. It is a better thing seeing many people are working on it and realizing I can contribute to the industry sometime.

Personal Contribution

In the past few weeks, I contributed to Open Street Map, Wikipedia and a Github. I contribute approximately once a week. For Open Street Map, I added information to total 4 places near my home in Beijing, China. For Wikipedia, I completed the page for an application I love very much, Procreate. It is an iPad painting app, and I mainly wrote its function on Wikipedia. For the Github project, it is an open source project for visualizing popular algorithms. I looked through its issues and found that several users are reporting difficulties installing it. But I later found that actually installation is mentioned, but in the wrong place, it is written in CONTRIBUTING.md, so I opened an issue suggesting they do corresponding changes.

I would say the biggest challenge is actually finding things to contribute to. There are many restrictions, for example, finding a problem, and analyzing whether it is something that I am able to fix. Although there are tons of open issues on Github, due to my personal limited knowledge, for most of them, I have completely no idea. So my next step to do contribution might be starting with small but active projects. I assume it would be much easier to understand how the project works. I may also try doing contribution for documentation.

As for the most satisfying contribution by far, it is hard to pick one since I haven’t done a lot to be honest. If I have to choose one, I would say writing wikipedia page for Procreate. I like the feeling that I am contributing to something I truly love, writing introduction of it so that more people can know it through wiki. I guess that passion is the ultra motivation for people to contribute to a community.