Bibliograph: A Prototypical AppView for Books

Bibliograph is an application interface (appview) designed to facilitate seamless interaction with bibliographic information on ATProto. Primarily, it serves the Livtet project, currently in its alpha stage, which focuses on book discovery and review on the ATProto protocol.

When a book is not recognized by Bibliograph, the system automatically searches Google Books and OpenLibrary to locate the relevant information. If these sources fail to provide the necessary data, users can attempt to create an unverified book entry, which will then require approval from a user with the librarian account label. This process mirrors the approach employed by Hardcover, Fable, and OpenLibrary.

The Bibliograph appview supports various lexicons and XRPC endpoints, allowing for seamless integration and access to bibliographic data. Currently, it defines 28 lexicon files under the community.lexicon.book.* namespace, encompassing 8 records for book, claim, review, status, shelf, shelfItem, contributor, and contributor.type entities.

It also serves 11 queries and 7 procedures through the appview interface. Furthermore, the appview publishes records, including the five canonical contributor.types (author, illustrator, editor, translator, and narrator) and auto-created contributor records when mirroring BookHive catalog data.

In addition to these features, Bibliograph includes an OpenLibrary editions bulk backfill mechanism, which is both resumable and idempotent. The system also mirrors BookHive catalog data and reading status, with labeler accounts emitting book:author (claim-verified) and book:librarian (admin) labels. The labeler's DID is did:web:biblio.livtet.olamaelcu.net, and users can subscribe to label updates via the WebSocket service at wss://biblio.livtet.olamaelcu.net/xrpc/com.atproto.label.subscribeLabels.

To engage with Bibliograph, users are encouraged to explore the reference documentation, provide feedback, test its functionality, and review the provided code on GitHub.