OpenStreetMap community

Some maps displaying public bookcases:

• https://priceless.zottelig.ch/?offers=education%2Fbook-exchange
• https://sustainable.zottelig.ch/?offers=education%2Fbooks
• https://mapcomplete.org/bookcases.html
• https://www.flosm.org/en/poimap.html?sw=publicbookcase

You can find maps displaying a specific tag with taginfo:

• Search for the tag in taginfo
• Go to the Projects tab on the page of the tag
• It will list a lot of osm based projects which support the tag.

I found these maps here: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/amenity=public_bookcase#projects

https://osmapp.org/ also supports searching for a category, just search for public bookcase and select the category

https://osmand.net/ you can just search "Public Bookcase", and hit "Show on Map"

Overpass-turbo is great for specific searches. Here's an example looking for amenity=public_bookcase: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2d8j

You can move the view around, then press "Run" to search again within the current view area.

The query syntax is a bit complex, but the "wizard" function handles simple queries very well.

The easiest way for me is the Mapcomplete theme for bookcases: https://mapcomplete.org/bookcases.html With this, besides finding, you can also maintain existing ones.

(and i do not know a good way to find bookcases directly on osm.org without the help of e.g. overpass)

However, if I search for “public_bookcase” in openstreetmap.org search bar, I don’t get the result I want. How can define in my research keys and values?

AFAICT, the search feature on openstreetmap.org is meant to be used with human-readable expressions, i.e. "public bookcase" with a space, not underscore.

But I just tested it with various queries for "public bookcase near [city]" and they all gave me plenty of results, both with and without an underscore. Apparently searching for "public_bookcase" with an underscore by itself (without a city) only gives results that are named something like "public bookcase" (which should almost never happen, but that's a different question).

Ultimately the search feature on openstreetmap.org is unfortunately somewhat limited and if you want more sophisticated ways of searching the database, there are plenty of options available.

I never thought about adding these but I'll do it now!

@pseudo

Try OsmApp 0. It normally would try to open the map near you, or browse the region you're interested in.

It supports search-as-you-type, so start typing "public bookcase" -- and even before you get to finish typing that phrase, you should be able to select a "Public Bookcase" category, and that should give you some interesting results.

Overpass-turbo is great, if not very layperson-friendly.

I just tried searching for “boite à livres” (using the “show on map” option) on Comaps (the mobile app I use daily as a map) and it works very well. Upsides: easy to use, works offline. Downsides: you have to download an app, and the data is only updated once a month, so if a public bookcase was added very recently, you won’t find it.

(It should work on Organic Maps too, which CoMaps is a recent fork of. And probably on other apps too?)

@pseudo use Overpass Turbo.
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2d89
Move map to your area (or search box on map), but not to big an area, and click "Run".
Click "Wizard" to search for other things (if you know the key-value pair).

The search on OSM.org only looks at the value of the "name" tag (and similar tags like alt_name and name:fr).