OpenShelves is a modern platform designed to revolutionize the university library experience. We are turning complex, legacy academic catalogs into intuitive, high-performance, and open discovery platforms that empower students and researchers.
Important
Project Status: Under Active Development OpenShelves is currently in an early development phase. The project is not yet ready for production deployment. We are focusing on building the core architecture and defining our primary feature set.
Libraries should be as easy to search as the web, yet as reliable as a scholarly archive. OpenShelves bridges this gap by providing:
- Intuitive Discovery: A fast, modern UI that makes finding resources effortless.
- Robust Architecture: A resilient backend built for scale and reliability.
- Open Standards: Built on open principles to serve the global academic community.
OpenShelves is organized as a high-performance monorepo:
/backend: Core API services providing the intelligence behind the platform./frontend: The next-generation user interface (Coming Soon)./infra: Modern Infrastructure as Code for seamless scaling (Coming Soon).
Our backend is built with cutting-edge technologies to ensure stability and performance:
- Core: Java 25 (Azul JVM) & Spring Boot 4.0.6
- Persistence: PostgreSQL with Spring Data JPA
- Resilience: Fault tolerance via Resilience4j
- Client: High-performance HTTP via OkHttp3
- Testing: Comprehensive coverage with JUnit 5
We are looking for early contributors, visionaries, and library enthusiasts!
- Check out our CONTRIBUTING.md to get started.
- Review our GOVERNANCE.md to see how we operate.
- Help us shape the future of academic discovery.
- AI Agent Instructions (AGENTS.md)
- AI Usage Policy
- Security Policy
- Anti-Impersonation Policy
- License (Business Source License 1.1)
© 2026 OpenShelves Labs. Built with ❤️ for the academic community.