Load Open Library data to DuckDB

Open Library provides a suite of APIs for accessing bibliographic data and managing user content like reading logs and lists. Everything needed to build a working Open Library → DuckDB pipeline is on this page: the API's base URL, authentication, endpoints, pagination and incremental field — plus a prompt that hands the whole job to your coding agent.

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Build your Open Library to DuckDB pipeline

Paste this prompt into Claude, Codex, or Cursor. The agent does the rest.

PromptCopy prompt
Run uvx dlthub-init@latest to build a pipeline from Open Library to DuckDB and run it on dltHub

That scaffolds a dltHub workspace and installs the dltHub AI harness — the project rules, the secrets-management skill, and the dlt MCP server your agent needs to work safely. From there it reads the Open Library API, proposes the endpoints to load, then writes, runs and validates the pipeline while you review rather than type. Credentials are inspected through MCP tools, so your agent never reads secrets.toml itself. How the LLM-native workflow works →

Prefer to write it yourself? Every fact the agent uses is below.

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Open Library API at a glance

These values come from the Open Library API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.

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How do I authenticate with the Open Library API?

Read-only operations do not require authentication. For write operations (e.g., editing records), authentication is performed via a POST request to /account/login.json with S3 access and secret keys, which returns a session cookie that must be included in subsequent request headers.

1. Get your credentials

Most Open Library endpoints are public and do not require authentication. If you need to perform write/account-specific actions, you must use your Internet Archive S3 credentials. To obtain these, log in to your account at https://archive.org/ and visit https://archive.org/account/s3.php to retrieve your access and secret keys. These keys are then used to programmatically authenticate by sending a POST request to https://openlibrary.org/account/login with the JSON payload {"access": "YOUR_ACCESS_KEY", "secret": "YOUR_SECRET_KEY"} to receive a session cookie.

2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml

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[sources.open_library_source]
# No credentials are required for public GET endpoints. # If performing authorized actions, do not hardcode keys; # store them as environment variables or dlt secrets.
api_access_key = "your_s3_access_key_here"
api_secret_key = "your_s3_secret_key_here"

dlt reads this file automatically at runtime. With the harness, the setup-secrets skill prompts you for the values and never handles the raw credential in chat. For production, see setting up credentials with dlt.

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What Open Library data can I load into DuckDB?

These are the Open Library endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:

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How do I load only new Open Library records?

The Open Library API reference does not document a timestamp or sequence field for these endpoints, so there is nothing to advertise here as verified. Pick a field from the endpoints table above that increases with every write, then set it as the cursor_path.

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{"name": "search", "endpoint": {
    "path": "search.json",
    # Replace with a field that increases on every write.
    "incremental": {"cursor_path": "REPLACE_ME", "initial_value": "2024-01-01T00:00:00Z"},
}}

On the first run dlt loads everything from initial_value; on every run after that it requests only what changed and appends with write_disposition="merge" if you set a primary key. See incremental loading.

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What does the generated Open Library pipeline look like?

A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading search.json and works/{work_id}.json from the Open Library API into DuckDB:

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import dlt
from dlt.sources.rest_api import RESTAPIConfig, rest_api_resources

@dlt.source
def open_library_source(api_key=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "https://openlibrary.org",
            "auth": {"type": "http_basic", "username": "REPLACE_ME", "password": api_key},
        },
        "resources": [
            {"name": "search", "endpoint": {"path": "search.json", "data_selector": "docs"}},
            {"name": "query", "endpoint": {"path": "query.json"}}
        ],
    }
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def load_open_library_to_duckdb() -> None:
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="open_library_pipeline",
        destination="duckdb",
        dataset_name="open_library_data",
    )
    load_info = pipeline.run(open_library_source())
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load_open_library_to_duckdb()

Run it with python open_library_pipeline.py. The agent iterates on this until it loads cleanly — you review and approve, rather than write it from scratch.

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How do I query Open Library data in DuckDB?

dlt creates one table per resource. Query the loaded data with Python or SQL — or ask your agent to, through the MCP server's execute_sql_query tool.

Python (pandas DataFrame):

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import dlt

data = dlt.pipeline("open_library_pipeline").dataset()
df = data.search.df()
print(df.head())

SQL:

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SELECT * FROM open_library_data.search LIMIT 10;

See querying your data with dataset and exploring it in marimo notebooks.

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How do I deploy the Open Library to DuckDB pipeline in production?

The pipeline runs locally, which is ideal for prototyping and one-off analysis. When you need it on a schedule, monitored on every load, and shared with your team, deploy the same dlt code on the dltHub platform — no infrastructure to maintain. The prompt above already ends with "run it on dltHub", so your agent can take it there directly.

• Deploy & schedule — run the pipeline as a managed job with automatic retries.
• Monitor — observable job queues, alerting, and load metrics for every run.
• Transform — promote raw Open Library loads into governed, documented models.
• Visualize & share — explore data in notebooks and publish live dashboards instead of static screenshots.

Book a demo →

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What other destinations can I load Open Library data to?

dlt loads into any of these — only the destination argument changes:

Set dlt.pipeline(destination="snowflake") and add credentials in .dlt/secrets.toml. On the dltHub platform the same pipeline runs against a managed Iceberg lakehouse. See the full destinations list.

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Next steps

• Ready for production? Book a demo of the dltHub platform →
• dlt LLM-native workflow docs
• REST API source reference
• Join the dlt community on Slack