Archive for May, 2008

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

Recommendations, part 2

I’ve added a few improvements to the new member recommendations:

  • You can now dismiss individual recommendations and never see them again.
  • I’ve added a checkbox to make member book recommendations reciprocal–so both books recommend each other.
  • The Recommendations Zeitgeist page is more complete.

Labels: new feature, new features

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

The Nifty Fifty

big bucket of fifty chicken nuggetsWe’ve just hit our first major milestone: there are now 50 libraries using LibraryThing for Libraries. See the full list here. For a visual representation of what may be the opposite of LibraryThing for Libraries, but of the same number, look to the right.

We’re also pleased that number 50 is Portland Public Library, in LibraryThing’s hometown. We attended the implementation, and we’re happy to say that their bouncing baby catalog enhancements are doing just fine.

These first 50 libraries include early innovators like Seattle Public Library and San Francisco State University. It was satisfying to hear prospective libraries say they watch these innovators for emerging technology to look into, and that’s how they found out about us. Three cheers for word of blog.

We’re convinced that LTFL is a highly enriching supplement to the white bread that is the standard online catalog and we’re happy that we can create something that meshes with OPACs to make them more functional.

So what’s next? We’re getting the reviewing enhancement ready to show. If anyone wants to come check it out, we’ll be showing them off at the ALA annual conference. In the meantime, you can pat our backs at Book Expo America.

Thanks to deovolenti for the image.

Labels: librarything for libraries, LTFL, ltfl libraries, Portland Public Library, San Francisco State University, Seattle Public Library, web 2.0

Monday, May 26th, 2008

LibraryThing recommendations!



LibraryThing Recommendations—called “the best feature on the site” by one user—are back and much better than before.

You can find recommendations at the top of your profile page. Or check out mine.

The new recommendations include:

  • A large number of primary recommendations for ever member—usually 1,000—based on a single comprehensive algorithm.
  • Individual recommendation lists for each member’s tags.
  • Filtering of recommendations by popular LibraryThing tags.
  • Individual lists of other members’ recommendations (member recommendations were added two weeks ago)
  • Up to 500 so-bad-they’re-good recommendations, building off the LibraryThing Unsuggester, and called “Your Unsuggester.”* We hope “What I shouldn’t read” has some meme legs.
  • A “why” feature for each recommendation, laying out what the recommendation was based on.
  • A pony.**

I let the recommendations themselves out early—see the original talk post, with over 140 messages!—and members had mostly positive reactions. Those who don’t like them can perhaps be molified by the greater number and ways to filter and angle the recommendations.

Recommendations now change daily—faster if you are below 200 books and keep adding them. The system keeps track of all recommendations and when you received them. In the near future I plan to provide personalized recommendation emails based on new recommendations.

I’ve created a new Talk thread to discuss the changes, and suggest changes. My thanks to those who participated in the initial thread, influencing development in a number of important ways.


*If Thomas Jefferson is in Hell, I am confident the Devil is torturing him with books from Jefferson’s Unsuggester List—heavy on the chick- and tween-lit!
*With apologies to Last.fm.

Labels: new feature, new features, recommendations

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Works, editions, ISBNs and cocktails


We got your Harry Potter and the Angus an Orchloch right here!

Short verson.I’ve just completed a major change in the “substructure” of LibraryThing’s data, the “works system” that links different editions together. The system is better and will allow more betterness down the road. It was the reason we were down most of last night. We regret that, but think the change will prove worth it.

Long version—What are “Works?” LibraryThing’s work system brings users together around the books they’ve read, not the peculiarities of publisher, format or even language. Works are created and tended by members, who “combine” editions together into works. Anyone can do it, but the die-hards created a large and active group—Combiners!—to trade tips, debate philosophy, muster effort—and complain about the system!

Combiners is a remarkable community, and one that has gone without a nod from me for some time. I hope these changes encourage them, and the prospect of future improvements built on surer footing.


The Combiners! know the stakes, as their group logo tells us.

Since the beginning I’ve promoted the idea of the “cocktail party” test.* This test answers whether two books belong to the same work by asking whether their readers would, in casual conversation, own up to reading the same book or not. So, for example, in such a context it wouldn’t matter if you had read a book in its hardcover or paperback edition, or listened to it on CD. If the cute girl with the backless dress mentions she’s fond of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the edition is immaterial (but see this link). I also suspect that title differences occasioned by marketing considerations—eg., Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (UK) vs. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (US)—wouldn’t matter. Nor should language itself matter; few would turn a cold shoulder to a Finnish Tolkien fan merely because he read Tolkien in Finnish.**

What’s Changed? The core concept used to be that a work consisted of a discrete set of title-author pairs. We chose title-author to emphasize the loose, verbal nature of the cocktail party test, and because ISBNs are much less perfect than many believe.*** These title-author pairs we called “editions.”

Unfortunately, there are a small number of works that can’t be identified based on title and author alone. This happens particularly in science fiction and graphic novels. (Apparently the Fantasy Hall of Fame currently entombs two distinct works—same title, same authors but different contents and publisher. Someone should be punished for that.) My bête noire are Cliff’s Notes filed in with the works they “interpret.” No appletini for you “Great Expectations”!

The system still automatically assigns new editions based on author and title. But I’ve added ISBNs to the mix, so members can combine and separate editions looking at and according to their ISBNs.

Other changes:

  • Title-author-ISBN bundles are now distiguished by the smallest details, so you can separate “Hard Times” from “Hard times” from “Hard times” with a period at the end. It has vastly increased the number of editions in the system. (There are now more than 1,200 editions of the Hobbit!) This is was mostly a technical decision.
  • The original system produced a few “hash collisions,” utterly different books thrown in together unhappily. This has been a long-running defect—and complaint. The new system will allow their separation, although existing ones will need to be separated.
  • The Combination and Debris (renamed “Editions”) pages should be faster. Some will start—and stall!—on a message about updating edition information. Once the editions have been calculated, the page will be faster.

As mentioned above, the new system was responsible for our extended downtime last night. Between a few mistakes and a database just shy of 27 million books, it took longer than we thought. I hope that the changes prove worthwhile in and of themselves.

Being much better designed, the new system should enable:

  • Edition-level pages
  • Edition-to-edition and work-to-work relationships
  • Member and book matching that takes editions into account
  • An end to the “dead languages” exception to the cocktail party test.
  • More opportunities for me to discuss the Pop-Up Kama Sutra at library conferences.

I’ve created a Talk thread for members who want to discuss the changes.


*Perhaps wishing I’d get invited to a few more cocktail parties! Speaking of which, are you going to Book Expo America 2008 in Los Angeles? We are.
**Whether you choose to avoid the Finnish Tolkien fan at cocktail parties is, of course, up to you.
***In fact, publishers recycle ISBNs, steal ISBNs, make up ISBNs, print wrong ISBNs, apply ISBNs to large sets of seemingly discrete items and otherwise abuse the system all the time. Most of the time they work in a bookstore context. They aren’t really fit for a project of LibraryThing’s size and scope.

Labels: frbr, library science, new feature, new features, work pages, works

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Import upgrade

Mike—welcome Mike!*—has completed a major upgrade to the import system. The improvements are:

  • Better user interface.
  • Import now reads files from LibraryThing competitors, so you can move to us or synch your accounts.
  • Depending on the site, we pick up tags, reviews, ratings and comments. If you already have the books in your library, you avoiding adding the books again, but synch your user data.
  • The sites include Anobii, Shelfari and Goodreads. If you use someone else—there are more than 35 of them!—let us know. If the offer export—not all sites do—we can work it out.
  • If your file is formatted properly—formatted like the LibraryThing export or any of our competitors’—we now import non-ISBN books.

Import is still based on the idea that—when possible—LibraryThing re-fetches the bibliographic data. This adds another step, an “import queue.” But it also allows members to import full records, which no other site exports, and to get high-quality library data, if they want it.

Tell us what you think on Talk. It’s probably going to take a while to spell out what it does and doesn’t do and to update the old Adding and Importing FAQs.


*Mike (member: notmydadslibrary) is a new intern up here in Portland. This was a doozy of a first project!

Labels: import, new feature, new features