9 September 2026 · Book Assembly Team · 3 min read
If you've imported a library from Goodreads or StoryGraph, you'll know the feeling. The books are all there, but plenty of them arrived with gaps: no cover, no page count, no publisher, a format of "unknown". Library Health has always been good at showing you what's missing. Filling it in has meant opening books one at a time. Not any more.
Open Library Health (Dashboard, then Maintenance, then Library Health) and press Look Up Missing Info. It looks each book up by its ISBN on ISBNdb and Open Library and brings back whatever it can find:
Nothing is saved straight away. You get a review screen with everything it found, grouped book by book, and you can untick anything you'd rather leave out before saving. If it found a cover you don't like, or a page count that's for a different edition, just untick it.
The important rule: nothing you've already filled in is ever changed. The lookup only fills empty fields. If you've set a format by hand, or chosen a particular cover, it stays exactly as it is.
The lookup follows your view. Filter Library Health to books missing a publisher and it fills in publishers. Tick a handful of books and it looks up just those. That makes it easy to work through one kind of gap at a time, or deal with a particular shelf first.
It runs twenty-five books at a time, which takes about half a minute, so for a large library you run it again to carry on with the next batch.
Some books can't be looked up. A book with no ISBN has nothing to search by, and genres are something you choose yourself rather than something we fill in. The summary line accounts for every book on the list, along the lines of: "We can fill in missing details for 129 of the 137 books here. Of the other 8, 4 have no ISBN to look them up by and 4 need only genres, which you choose yourself." So you know which books only you can complete.
If a lookup finds nothing more to add for a book, that book is left out of the next few runs. Without that, the same handful of unfindable books would come up every time and you'd never get any further. Running the lookup again always moves you on to books you haven't tried yet.
Those books aren't hidden for good. They have their own Looked up tab, next to Dismissed, where you can see which ones they are and put any of them, or all of them, straight back into the queue. Cancelling a lookup, or unticking a book on the review screen, leaves it exactly as it was, and it will be looked up again next time.
Library Health now tracks First Published as well: the year a book first appeared, as opposed to the year your edition was printed. Your 2019 paperback of Pride and Prejudice was printed in 2019, but the book first appeared in 1813.
It counts towards your completeness score like the other details, so you may see your score dip a little at first. The lookup can fill most of them in for you, so a run or two should put it back.
