Open Library Author Bibliography Scraper

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Resolve author names to their complete Open Library bibliography. Input a list of author names and get back full author profiles — bio, birth and death dates, external IDs (VIAF, Wikidata, ISNI, Goodreads), alternate name forms, photo URL, Wikipedia link, and a works list with first-publish year, edition count, subjects, and cover images.

What does it do?

For each author name you supply, this actor:

1. Resolves the name — queries the Open Library author search API and returns the best-matching author record (exact name match preferred; falls back to the top search hit)
2. Fetches the author profile — retrieves bio, birth/death dates, alternate names, photo, Wikipedia URL, and external authority IDs
3. Paginates the full works list — fetches all works (or up to maxWorksPerAuthor) including title, first-publish year, edition count, subjects, and cover image URL

No authentication or proxy required. Open Library is a fully open API. The actor is rate-limited to approximately 1 request per second to stay respectful of Open Library's guidelines.

Output fields

Each result record contains:

Input

{
"authors":["J.R.R. Tolkien","Ursula K. Le Guin","Philip K. Dick"],
"maxItems":10,
"maxWorksPerAuthor":50
}

Use cases

• Literary databases — build comprehensive author-centric catalogs
• Recommendation engines — enrich author profiles with verified bibliographies and external authority IDs
• RAG pipelines — structure author knowledge for retrieval-augmented generation over book data
• Library catalogs — cross-reference VIAF, Wikidata, and ISNI identifiers for authority control
• Data journalism — research author output, publication history, and subject coverage

Notes

• Open Library's works API does not include subjects or edition_count per-work in paginated responses; those fields are populated where available from the work record
• top_subjects and top_work are sourced from Open Library's pre-computed search signals when available, providing higher-quality signals than per-run aggregation
• The actor works as companion to the Open Library ISBN Book Metadata Scraper, which covers the ISBN/edition access pattern