Thursday, December 14th, 2017

LibraryThing Teams with the Office of American Spaces

We don’t usually do press releases, but here goes! “For immediate release” as they say.

tinycat_logoamerican_spaces_logoPortland, Maine, December 14, 2017. LibraryThing is proud to announce a partnership with US Department of State’s Office of American Spaces (OAS). The new partnership will provide LibraryThing’s small-library solution, TinyCat, to American Spaces around the world.

With 660 locations in 141 countries, American Spaces are often hosted outside capital cities within libraries, universities, and non-governmental organizations. These Spaces promote American values and culture by providing free access to American publications as well as opportunities to meet Americans and learn about American life, arts, and policy. Local citizens also benefit from programs that offer training in entrepreneurial skills, STEAM, social media, English, and much more.

LibraryThing has long supported the Office of American Spaces’ work. With free lifetime memberships to LibraryThing, hundreds of Spaces worldwide have been able to manage their own online libraries. But LibraryThing can be overwhelming as a public catalog. TinyCat offers a simple, contained experience for each OAS library, and adds library-catalog features like faceted searching and circulation.

“Smaller libraries like those run by American Spaces, especially those with limited funding, don’t have many good options,” said Tim Spalding, President of LibraryThing. “TinyCat will give American Spaces an online catalog every bit as good as a big library’s, but at a fraction of the cost.”

Chris Zammarelli, Applied Technology Contractor, expressed the value of the partnership between LibraryThing and OAS: “Our mission is to provide information about American policy and culture, and making that information findable is just as important as making it available. LibraryThing has helped us accomplish that goal…I remember talking to Tim a few years ago and I was delighted by his enthusiasm for our mission.”

TinyCat libraries for American Spaces can be found by searching LibraryThing.com or by reaching out to individual Spaces. To learn more about TinyCat, visit librarycat.org.


PDF of the official press release can be found here and on LibraryThing’s Press page.

Labels: press, TinyCat

2 Comments:

  1. elenchus says:

    TinyCat and American Spaces seem like a good fit for one another, not merely logistically but also in that their larger objectives each promote the other. Nice.

  2. Dave says:

    This is great. Greater heights for Library Thing.

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