The LibraryThing Blog

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

LibraryThing at BookExpo America

Tim and I are off to Los Angeles in the morning (in the very very early morning) to go to BookExpo America (BEA)—the US’s biggest book fair. It’s always a fun event, full of authors and publishers and booksellers and librarians and other book-industry-types.

The event is limited to people within the “book industry”, but that includes you, librarians, so come on down! Free advance copies of books, meeting publishers, conference sessions about programming events and new book titles—BEA is very librarian friendly. Online registration is closed, but you can still get in at the door.

If you’re at a loss for things to do (how could you be?) Tim is giving a talk (“Social Cataloging and Social Networking Experimentation: Insights from LibraryThing”) from 4-5 on Thursday (May 29th).

On LibraryThing, check out the BEA 2008 group and BookExpo America on LibraryThing Local. I started adding events to the listing on Local, but there are over 600 author autographing sessions so I gave up.

And if you’re going to be at BEA and want to set up a meeting (want to know more about Early Reviewers? Author Chat? Listing events or getting your bookstore into LibraryThing Local?), just drop me an email (abbylibrarything.com)

Meet up at the Library Bar — 7pm Friday night
While we’re there, we’re having an LA meet-up of LibraryThing members. So whether you’re in the area just for BEA, or you live there, it’s the perfect excuse to have a beer with us! Come join us at the Library Bar (630 West 6th St.—directions here) on Friday night (May 30th) at 7pm.

And everyone should check out the menu, even if you can’t come. The beer list is broken down into sections like “American Authors”, “Epic Novels”, “Women’s Studies”, and “Periodicals”. How can you resist?

Labels: bea, la, meet up

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

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

Monday, May 19th, 2008

Member book recommendations

I’ve just added a small new feature, Member recommendations. You can check it out under “Recommendations” here or here.*

Basically, you can now add your own recommendations to LibraryThing’s six (!) algorithmic recommendations. If you want, you can also leave a short explanation of your choice.

I’m throwing this one out pretty raw.** It’s available from the primary page of a work, and from its recommendation page, and on a single Member Recommendations page.

To be done:

A way to see all the recommendations you’ve given
A way to see all the recommendations others have applied to your books
Recommendation flagging
Up/down voting on recommendations?

Come talk about the feature and where it could go on Talk here.

*I hope to link to some better examples soon, one members start adding them. I find fiction recommendations very hard, so most of my recommendations so far have been off ancient history, which makes the feature seem much less interesting than it is!
**I’ve had this on ice for a while, while dealing with tags and scaling issues. I don’t think I’m going to be making major changes until Chris comes back from paternity leave later this week or next.

Labels: new feature, new features, recommendations

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

LibraryThing at the Philadelphia Book Festival

This weekend I represented LibraryThing at the Philadelphia Book Festival*. We had a booth, where I got to geek out about books and LibraryThing with readers, authors, and various styles of bibliophile.

I also gave a talk on the fine, fine merits of LibraryThing.

I met some awesome LibraryThing members, and a number of people who I think will be joining our ranks.

I’m glad to have gone to such a book-lovin’ event, in a really cool city.

*Abby was originally supposed to go, but I went in her stead.

Labels: event, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Book Festival, Sonya

Friday, May 16th, 2008

Two More Legacies Finished

The ever-growing pantheon of Legacy Libraries now includes two new members.

LTers Larxol and moibibliomaniac have cataloged the library of Samuel Johnson from the 1784 sale catalogue of his books (which, while neither complete nor accurate, is the best list available of the good Doctor’s library in his later years). Not surprisingly, Johnson shares many of his 748 books with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams (168 and 63 books respectively). The overlaps are endlessly fascinating, I think.

My own latest and long-running project has been the library of the Mather Family. This collection was accumulated by (and then dispersed among) members of several Mather generations, from patriarch Richard down through several of his great-grandsons. So far as I’ve been able to tell, this is the first time this collection has been put together in one place (a 1910 bibliography included a fair portion of the books, but not all of them; I’ve tracked down all the ones I can find, but I’m sure there are more out there squirreled away in other libraries, so I’ll be on the lookout for additions. I’ve written a (probably much too) lengthy introduction to collection on the Mather Family profile page, and if you’re so inclined have posted a few more of my own musings on this library here.

As always, anyone is welcome to participate in the Legacy projects (or start your own!). Stop by anytime.

Labels: legacies

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Top ten suggestions

Member lilypadma suggested we hire more people. But finding new good people is hard, so we opted for cloning.**

Just over a week ago* we asked members to come up with their recommendations on “Ten Ways to Make LibraryThing Better.” We promised to pick twenty-five winners, including ten winning answers and fifteen random picks.

Members heard the call, writing 259 answers for a total of 45,000 words–slightly longer than Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. Last week Sonya, Abby, Casey and I got together to work on LibraryThing for Libraries. We took a break on Wednesday to (drink and) read through the answers. We couldn’t pick just ten winners, so I’ve expanded it to 17–32 winners total. We could have easily done 50 more.

The Prizes. Winners get to chose between (1) A CueCat barcode scanner; (2) A LibraryThing t-shirt; (3) First dibs on a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.

Winners should let Abby (abby@librarything.com) know what you want. If you want the Early Reviewer book, you’re also going to need to change your Early Reviewers picks to select just one book. We’re going to give you an “ER mojo” of a million, so whatever you pick, you’ll get.

The Winners. Random Winners: rfb, maryanntherese, jocainster, Imprinted, circeus, jabogaer, rastaphrog, claudiuo, jjmcgaffey, arnzen, trojanpotato, surly, phoenixfire, sigridsmith

sophies_choice (7): “Let us mark which books are our favourite.” I’m divided whether to make this work like author and venue favorites, or to make it a “collection.”

PhoenixTerran (31): “Update debris and author pages immediately after combining/separating has occurred” A big leap is going to happen here very soon, with the introduction of a more stable “editions” layer. I’m actually doing edition-level calculations in the background today, with an eye to inaugurating the system on a limited basis tonight.

Philtill (160): We all loved Philtill’s ten suggestions, which amount to “Make LibraryThing more like Tickle.” There are dangers to personality tests and statistical correlatons, of course. But we love to play with data, and “tell me about myself” is one of the main reasons people use LibraryThing anyway. So, expect us to take these ideas seriously.

jocainster (28): “Add a link to the book’s main page in the ‘Recently Added’ section.” Abby had to be restrained after reading this one.

parelle (44): Parelle wrote two related suggestions–LT bookmarks and a parnership with Moo Cards. dreamlikecheese focused in on sending cards to libraries and bookshops. This is one area we’re definitely going to look into.

sabreuse (152). “I was at a conference last week where I picked up several new books, but didn’t have internet access all day. And I realized that I want to be able to add books by SMS, the same way I can send photos directly to flickr or add events to my google calendar by text message, both of which I do all the time. I’d love to be able to add new ISBNs to my library while I’m out shopping, or traveling, or tied up away from a computer.”

nperrin (17): “Some ingenious way to link books to books about them. If I’m looking at a novel, I want to know how to find the best criticism of that novel or author.”

usquam (109): “Work with publishers to get better integration of their catalogues into LibraryThing. They should have covers, contents, editions, etc – as per the new ‘series’ area, it would be interesting to see what we have from a particular publisher, and then have them show other editions or titles we might like or are missing.”

susiebright (155): “I loved Secret Santa; it was the hightlight of my Xmas gift giving because it was so entirely unexpected. I think you should offer a ‘Birthday Surprise’ gift program of the same kind. You pick a ‘birthday kid’s name’ out of the hat, and send them a book based on what you glean from their library!'” We’re thinking that BirthdayThing could be hard to arrange, but doing a mid-year (June 25?) Secret Santa sounds fun. This time, members are doing the ordering!

yhoitink (9): “Add the European Library as a source.” Casey is squarely behind this one.

amysisson (87): “a virtual ‘badge’ or ‘ribbon’ (like LT author) for on the profile pages of people who’ve contributed over a certain level(s) of info, such as CK or combining” I’d love to do something like this. I’m attracted to the Barnstar model.

papyri (95): “Provenance, ex-libris (previous owner(s)) info listing (can be done like multiple authors). Possibly including dates and locations. Privacy option for this would be nice.” Sophies_Choice also suggested this be integrated with LT Local. Good stuff.

ssd7 (111) “Cross Source Searching. So, I would like to get my data from the LoC. But I would also like to just punch in an ISBN. These two desires are not always compatible since searching on ISBN’s often yields nothing from the LoC. When a search returns no results why not use the LT database or Amazon to find the title and then research for the user? Or at the very least let me set up a ‘priority’ listing of the sources so that if LoC yields nothing, it will automagically search Amazon.” ssd7 (111) also suggested “Open source the code.” This continues to interest us. No promises.

hegelian (16): “OpenID might be a smarter way to login for some people.”

_Zoe_ (24): “The ability to reset the unread marker at the message you’ve actually read up to.”

zcannon (25): “A widget that works on WordPress.”

TerrierGirl (34): “Could each book’s original copyright year be added to the my library, add to library screens? This would help interested potential readers place each book in time. Also, it would tell a reader when a particular book fell within that writer’s career.” I’ve wanted to do this for some time.

Notes on Method. We decided to leave off a small number of common topics, including collections, author disambiguation, HelpThing, tagging of groups, web links on book pages, more than seven columns, and a Facebook application. They are very much on our radar already. Seeing them over and over again had its effect, you can be sure.

We also left off suggestions for features completed since we asked the question, like better tags, and to avoid new features in favor of bug-fixing. It’s a delicate thing, and not one we’ve always gotten right, I’ll admit. I’ve been on a bug-fixing and performance kick recently.

*That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it!
**The person you don’t know is Mike, a local Portland programmer working with us part-time for a few months. Note, I was supposed to be also sitting in the chair—reading Everything is Miscellaneous—but there was a tragic head/butt airspace issue.

Labels: employees, features, fun

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

Newest member!

Welcome to Katherine Evelyn Holland, born May 7 (6 pounds 11 ounces, 18.5 inches*), to LibraryThing developer Chris (ConceptDawg) and his wife Ashley. Mother and daughter are doing great. Chris has a “permanent smile” on.

More photos on Flickr

*That’s 3033 grams, 46.9 centimeters. Who says we don’t do metric?

Labels: adorable, chris, LibraryThing babies

Friday, May 9th, 2008

BookSense Events!

We just added over six-hundred and fifty events to LibraryThing Local, LibraryThing’s portal for local bookstores, libraries and events.

The events come direct from our friends at BookSense, the nationwide organization of over 1,200 independent bookstores. They made their complete events calendar available to us, and we were only to happy to add all the events we didn’t already know about.

BookSense is the best; if you have a favorite local bookstore, chances are they’re a BookSense store.* BookSense also gets the best authors. Upcoming events include David Sedaris at Vroman’s in Pasadena and Salman Rushdie at Vroman’s and at Caucer’s in Santa Barbara. Of course, as happens with distributed data collection, not every BookSense store has their events in the feed. And some events had already been added by members. Be the total gain is some 660 upcoming events—a big leap. We’ll be updating from th BookSense feed periodically from now on, which should take some of the data-entry load off of dedicated LibraryThing members.

So, thanks to the people at BookSense for working with us on this, and happy event-attending to the rest of us.

PS: There’s a short article about this in the ABA’s Bookselling this Week by David Grogan.

*My favorites—Books, Etc., Longfellow Books and the Harvard Coop—are all BookSense stores. My wife spent much of her 20s working at another, Bookline Booksmith, together with her best friend, who went on to work at Booksense. So, I’ve wanted LibraryThing to do something BookSense since we started.

Labels: authors, booksense, librarything local, new feature, new features

Monday, May 5th, 2008

May Early Reviewer books

May’s batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 51 books this month, and a grand total 1,115 copies to give out.

Some of the big highlights include the new Neal Stephenson (Anathem) and The Given Day by Dennis Lehane! Or would you rather read The Inverted World by Christopher Priest? The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen? Is historical fiction more your thing? Try Hallam’s War by Elisabeth Payne Rosen”. In the mood for some Norman Mailer? Request a copy of Miami and the Siege of Chicago. On the nonfiction side, how about a little bit of everything, with The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2…

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, *please* check your mailing address and make sure it’s correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Monday, May 19th at 6pm EDT.

Eligiblity:
Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, and for the first time, Australia! We only have one Australian publisher (I’m sure those 15 books will be coveted), but we’re working on getting more for the future.

Thanks to all the publishers, new and old!

Algonquin Books	Andrews McMeel Publishing	Bantam
Berkley	Canongate Books	Clerisy Press
Cypress House	Delacorte Press	Faber and Faber
Farrar Straus Giroux	Fremantle Press	Harper
Hatherleigh Press	Hyperion	LJW Publishing
Loving Healing Press	Menasha Ridge Press	Mirrorstone
Modern History Press	North Atlantic Books	NYRB Classics
Other Press	Picador	St. Martin’s Griffin
Trumpeter	Unbridled Books	W.W. Norton
William Morrow	Wizards of the Coast	Zoland Books

Labels: early reviewers, LTER

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

Top bar better, cuter

I made some changes to the look and functionality of the “top bar” in Your Library. They include new “pads,” new icons, yellow and baby-blue colors and new tag functionality. Non-English users will also notice the labels can nw be translated–no more untranslateable “text as image.”

List:

Covers:

Tags:

The tag bar includes a new new features. “Down” and “Across” control whether the tags are sorted “down” (like an index) or “across” (like some other things). You can also control the size of the text and the space between tags, and the number of columns to show.

Come talk about the change and suggest more on Talk.

Labels: new feature, new features, tags

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

LibraryThing Love and the Unread Books Meme

Part I
A long-time LibraryThing member, davidabrams, just wrote a love story of sorts about LibraryThing on The Readerville Journal.

He writes,

Not a day goes by when I don’t log on and gaze with pride, love and reverence at my online catalog of books. …In short, it is the answer to the prayer I wasn’t even aware I was praying. If LibraryThing is cocaine, then I am a crack whore.

How can you argue with that?

The Readerville Forum have been having some problems lately (see the discussion on LibraryThing here), and we wish them good luck!

Part II
We’ve been meaning to blog this for a while, so here it is! This meme has been going around for a while now: Top 106 unread books on LibraryThing. People are going through the top 106 books tagged “unread” on LT, and then marking which ones they’ve read, which they read for school, which they started but didn’t finish, which are on their to read list, which they loathed, which they read more than once…

Personally, I think the fact that most of the top ones are big fat heavy tomes might have something to do with it!

Labels: meme, readerville

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

New feature: Tag view / edit your tags

I’ve added a new feature—a “Tag view” for “Your library”, alongside the List and Shelf views.

The Tag view replaces the Tags tab. Like the tab, it shows your tags alphabetically, or by frequency and allows you to jump to a tag in your catalog.

But the tag view also allows you to edit your tags, “gardening them” in a very satisfying way. You can rename tags, delete tags or add tags. For example, from the tag view you can add “history” and “greece” everywhere you use the tag “greek history.” Editing is done in a lightbox, and “ajaxes” the changes back onto the screen with the “yellow fade technique.”

The technical infrastructure here is going to key to the upcoming (really) collections feature. Collections, which I think I’ll call “sets,” will turn the Tag view into “Sets/Tags.” (Anyway, that’s the plan!)

Let me know what you think about the new feature here, or on Talk.

Labels: new feature, new features, tags

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Covers: Better, Bigger, Blanks, Defaults and Statistics

Casual visitors are often surprised to learn that LibraryThing members have contributed more than 800,000 covers, for use when Amazon doesn’t have the right cover. It’s time to make the most of this strength!

I’ve added a five new features related to how LibraryThing handles covers. I hope you like the changes!

Choose member-created “blank” covers for every book.
Choose your default cover.
Better cover “guessing”
Cover Statistics and links to different cover types.
Member-contributed covers now available in all sizes.
Member-contributed covers now available in maximum quality.

Choose member-created “blank” covers for every book. Way back in November, I asked for members to send in images of blank covers–real, doctored and built from scratch–for books that have no other cover (see post and follow-up). More than a dozen members sent covers, often very many and beautiful. These covers are now available from the “change cover” page of every book. They vary from ordinary to fanciful, general or tailored to look like a specific publisher’s books. They’re a blast. Go crazy.

It’s hard to understate the care that some members lavish on projects like this, exercising their creative side and helping other members out. Check out the image credits, available under the display and when you roll over the images.

Choose your default cover. The same member-covers are also available as default covers, the cover you get when you have no other cover. You can change your default cover from every book’s change-cover page, as well as from your Cover Statistics.

Better cover “guessing”. This feature caused some members consternation when it was released provisionally a few days ago. Suddenly members got a whole bunch of new covers, some of which they didn’t want, with no way to opt out. I’ve added powerful opt-out options, so it’s time to reintroduce the feature.

The feature takes advantage of LibraryThing’s 800,000 member-uplaoded covers. If you have books from more than a few years ago, like I do, a lot of your books don’t have Amazon covers. Before now, you could choose these covers manually, replacing our “blank” cover with your own or someone else’s uploaded cover.

Now were taking that data—the covers people choose for a given ISBN—to “guess” at the covers for coverless books. In general, members choose the right cover for their edition, especially when LibraryThing can look at many members’ decisions. In the case of my books, LibraryThing found 69 covers. Only one is dead-wrong, with two others being subtle variants of the cover I have. Of course, you can easily switch to a different cover, a blank cover or no cover.

Cover Statistics and links to different cover types. I’ve added a page for Cover Statistics. It shows where all you covers come from, with a link to all the books in that category. It’s a great way to go through your blanks or confirm LibraryThing’s new “best guess” covers.

The Cover Statistics page also has a link to change your default cover. (In case you’re wondering, I’m working on a all-encompassing “preferences” page. One thing at a time.)

Member-contributed covers now available in all sizes. Until now, LibraryThing only displayed two sizes for member-contributed covers–tiny and medium. For the last eight months we’ve been saving large versions, but we didn’t use them. Storing all the sizes or making them on the fly scared us.

A new server and some technical changes have given us the opportunity to show covers at whateve size they’re needed. The result is a much more attractive and even Cover View, which scales from teeny to upsettingly large (see image).

Member-contributed covers now available in maximum quality. As said, we were not previously taking advantage of original images, but only two presized versions. Although early-on we didn’t store them—server space was just too dear—we have been storing original versions for about eight months. This amounts to some 300,000 out of 800,000 covers. (Of course, not all “originals” are actually large; some are thumbnails.)

The result is that some member-contributed covers can now be sized to elephantine dimensions within your catalog, and look great on work pages, which use medium-large images. Unfortunately, some covers look a bit “pixelated” at these large sizes. The examples below illustrate both effects:

A final word. I want to thank members who pushed me on this feature. Although the general change has been planned for some time, it received impetus from a “bug fix” that introduced many best-guess covers. Without an easy way to “opt-out” of guesses—without choosing another cover—a few members went bananas.

The were right to do so! It created a weird situation, one I realized the more when I spent an hour “gardening” my covers. Once again, it was a pleasure to work through the issue with members. I’ve very pleased with the feedback, and as I rolled out some of these features over the weekend.

Maybe some day I’ll write a book about working with and for you guys. But you’re doing the cover.

Labels: book covers, new feature, new features

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Bonus batch of Early Reviewer books from Random House

Random House has given us a bonus batch of Early Reviewer books this month!

There are six titles up, and a whopping total of 470 copies to give out. So go sign up (if you haven’t already), and then request your copy to read and review!

The list is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Wednesday, April 30th at 6pm, EDT. These books are only available to residents of the US and Canada.*

*In another country? Don’t despair. The May batch, which will be out very soon, includes books for residents of the US, Canada, and the UK and Australia!

Labels: early reviewers, LTER, random house

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Introducing Author Chat

We’re kicking off a new feature today, Author Chat.

Nick Trout, author of New York Times bestseller Tell Me Where It Hurts is going to be on LibraryThing for the next few weeks (from today, April 14th through April 30th). He’ll be talking about the book, and his work, and answering questions from you, the readers. Start coming up with questions!

If you were one of the lucky 24 to receive a free copy of the book in last month’s batch of Early Reviewer books, then you’ve got a head start!

If you didn’t get a free copy, then don’t fret. The book is out in bookstores and libraries, so go buy or borrow a copy now, and get reading.

Join the discussion in the Author Chat group. The direct link to the Nick Trout thread is here.

About the book

It’s 2:47 a.m. when Dr. Nick Trout takes the phone call that starts another hectic day at the Angell Animal Medical Center. Sage, a ten-year old German shepherd, will die without emergency surgery for a serious stomach condition. Over the next twenty-four hours Dr. Trout fights for Sage’s life, battles disease in the operating room, unravels tricky diagnoses, reassures frantic pet parents, and reflects on the humor, heartache, and inspiration in his life as an animal surgeon. And he wants to take you along for the ride…

From the front lines of modern medicine, Tell Me Where It Hurts is a fascinating insider portrait of a veterinarian, his furry patients, and the blend of old-fashioned instincts and cutting-edge technology that defines pet care in the twenty-first century. For anyone who’s ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at your veterinarian’s office, Tell Me Where It Hurts offers a vicarious journey through twenty-four intimate, eye-opening, heartrending hours at the premier Angell Animal Medical Center in Boston.

Nick Trout is a staff surgeon at the Angell Animal Medical Center and lives near Boston, Massachusetts.

For more on the book, check out this YouTube video, or even read an excerpt on the Broadway Books website.

Future Author Chats
This isn’t a one-time feature. I’ve got several other authors lined up, and am looking for more! If you’re interested in participating, email abby@librarything.com

Labels: author chat, new feature

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Tags and hiccups

This weekend we made a number of important structural changes to how LibraryThing’s 34.8 million tags are stored in the database. (For database heads, tags are now “fully normalized.”)

The immediate upside is that tags can now be up to 255 characters long. It will also allow us to improve some features, such tag editing.

The downside is that the changes have hurt performance. Certainly the site is running very “hot,” forcing us to choose between running slow and pulling back service. Right now we’re doing the latter, redirecting most non-member traffic to the home page to sign in or sign up. This cuts back the large proportion of our traffic that is bot-related, but we can’t run this way for too long.

It’s unclear if the change is itself to blame or the loss of various tag-related caches, which need to be built up afresh with the new structures. There also appear to be some places that are hurting more than others, which code can perhaps be re-written. We’re going to be looking carefully at what we can do, and deciding whether we need to make additional changes, or pull back the ones we made.

Thanks for your patience. The next few days may see occasional slowness or downtimes. With the four of us on it, however, we hope to minimize problems and solve this to everyone’s satisfaction.

Labels: 1

Friday, April 11th, 2008

Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale (SBN) – Italian National Library Service

Cari utenti di LibraryThing.it, abbiamo appena aggiunto* una nuova fonte per la catalogazione di libri italiani, l’OPAC del Servizio Bibliografico Nazionale (SBN), una rete di oltre 3200 biblioteche. Lo trovate tra le fonti italiane sotto il suo nome inglese: Italian National Library Service.
Buona catalogazione a tutti!

Casey just announced 669 cataloging sources few days ago, but now we have just reached 681 sources! Among the new sources there’s also the Italian National Library Service.

* Si, ci abbiamo messo un po’, ma c’era un bug che non riuscivamo a risolvere. Un grazie speciale a Casey che ha sopportato tutte le mie lamentele in nome della community italiana e alla fine ha trovato la soluzione!

Photo credit: “Italy!…Here We Come!” photo by Flikr user Hvnly, used under a CC-Attribution license

Labels: italy, new libraries, z39.50

Friday, April 4th, 2008

What Books Do You Share with Hemingway?

Some updates from the Legacy Libraries front: yesterday saw the completion of the largest LT-Legacy catalog to date, that of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s library (compiled by Dr. James D. Brasch and Dr. Joseph Sigman of McMaster University, and provided online [PDF] through Boston’s John F. Kennedy Library) included more than 7,000 titles (7,411 to be exact). A small team of dedicated Thingambrarians has been entering them since 4 January: many thanks to nperrin, who initiated the project; spookykitten (who added about 2,450 books); christiguc (2,350); Rullakartiina (1,350); and jjlong (1,200). Amazing work for a three-month period!

You can read more about the Hemingway effort at this talk thread; they’re looking for tagging assistance and offer some suggestions for where to read more about Hemingway and his books. It’s a fascinating and very wide-ranging collection, so if you have some time to browse through it, do.

Much removed from Hemingway’s library (so far removed, in fact, that they share no books at all) is the library of British scientist James Smithson (1765-1829), the man responsible for the creation of the Smithsonian Institution. His books were included in the bequest he made to the United States, and they now reside in the vault of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History (digital gateway). There are currently 113 titles in the catalog; a few more will follow (I’m told that eight more books from Smithson’s library were recently found in the Library of Congress and are now making their way back to the Smithsonian).

I worked with the Smithsonian’s Martin Kalfatovic and Suzanne Pilsk on this project, and Martin has a post up on the SI blog about the addition of Smithson’s library. As one might expect, most of the books in Smithson’s collection are scientific tracts, but the catalog also includes some cookbooks, travel accounts, reference works, &c.

Hemingway and Smithson have been added to the “Overlap with Legacy Libraries” section of your stats page (introduced here).

We’ve also been continuing to enhance John Adams’ LT catalog since its unveiling; through the wonderful assistance of Boston Public Library staff we’ve been able to make transcriptions of much of John Adams’ fascinating marginalia widely available for the first time (see what he thought, for example, of Mary Wollstonecraft’s An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution) – his copy of the book contains more than 10,000 words written in the margins! I’ve also been adding comments from JA’s diary and other writings about specific authors or works; that’s going to be an ongoing process, but it’s at least underway.

You can keep track of progress on the various Legacy projects by clicking here.

[Update: Thingamabrarian spookykitten reports that the cataloging of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s library (322 books now held at Princeton) has also been completed. So you can now satisfy your curiosity and see how many books Fitzgerald and Hemingway share.]

Labels: dead people, john adams, legacies, special libraries

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

Common Knowledge in your library

What just happened. Yesterday saw two huge announcements I’m loathe to “push down.”

We jumped from 250 to 669 sources, giving LibraryThing solid, high-quality cataloging in many new languages (e.g., Russian, Arabic, Lithuanian, Thai).
The April Early Reviewers books went up. It’s the biggest month ever, with 1,599 free books on offer–all free.

(What it didn’t see was an April Fools message, although some took the 160% increase in sources for one! Does this mean we get to fool people later on this year?)

Common Knowledge in your library.

Today we’ve introduced our “Common Knowledge” feature directly into your catalog—allowing members to look at and edit series information, important places and the rest directly in their catalog.

To look at it, go to your catalog and choose the “edit” link to the right of the A, B, C, D, E styles. You’ll see a number of CK fields as options. To edit CK fields, just double-click in the cell. A CK editing “lightbox” will pop up (see right).

Some thoughts. On one level, this is a minor feature. The data was always a click away. But I suspect it will substantially change members’ relationship to Common Knowledge—and make it grow all the faster. Together with my introduction of pages for member’s series, CK now “does” something.

Caveats. Right now you can’t sort by CK fields, and you can’t search by them. Sorting is doable, although it will take some sort. Searching is going to be harder, frankly. But it’s not out of the question. Lastly, we still haven’t solved CK language issues, so you may get series information in a language you don’t understand.

Discuss it here.

Labels: april fools, common knowledge, early reviewers, LTER, new feature, new features, new libraries

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

April Early Reviewer books

April’s batch of Early Reviewer books is up! This month features 66 different books from 33 different publishers, totaling 1,599 copies. It’s our biggest batch ever–I know, I said that last month, but apparently we grow fast around here!

Sign up to get a free advance copy, in exchange for writing a review. If you’re already signed up, make sure to check that your name and mailing address are correct (here). More help available in the Early Reviewers Frequently Asked Questions.

Then just go ahead and request books to read and review! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Tuesday, April 8th at 6pm EDT.

New and noteworthy things this round:

Audio books. We have our first audio book in this batch, (Elizabeth Berg’s The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted). Love listening? Tell us, and we’ll try to get more audio books included.

Author Chat. We’re about to debut a new feature, Author Chat. To start, Broadway Books is giving out copies of Tell Me Where it Hurts, Nick Trout’s new book about a day in the life of an animal hospital. Read it, review it, think about it. Then Nick will be on LibraryThing from April 14th through the 30th to answer questions, talk about his work, etc. More details on Author Chats to come, so stay tuned.

New Publishers. As I said, there are 33 different publishers participating this round. Thanks to all of them, and of course, thanks to the publishers that just keep giving us books!

AMACOM	Andrews McMeel Publishing	Ballantine Books
Beacon Press	Bloomberg Press	Broadway
Canongate Books	Cleis Press	Delacorte Press
Dell	DiaMedica	Egmont
Handsel Books	Lantern Books	Loving Healing Press
Manic D Press	National Geographic	North Atlantic Books
Picador	Picnic Publishing	Random House Audio Publishing Group
Random House Trade Paperbacks	Shambhala	South Dakota State Historical Society
St. Martin’s Griffin	St. Martin’s Minotaur	St. Martin’s Press
Staghorn Press	Thomas Dunne Books	Vertical
W.W. Norton	William Morrow	Wizards of the Coast Discoveries

You’ll also notice that a few of the books are already released. A few of publishers new to Early Reviewers decided to include some back-list titles as well as new ones, to kick things off. Though we generally prefer pre-publication books, we decided to allow these less “release-driven” titles into the program.

Make sure to check the flags to see whether you’re eligible to receive each book. Most books are open to residents of the US and Canada, several are open to residents of the UK only. Pay attention–only the flags will tell you which is which!

Labels: early reviewers, LTER

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

669 Data Sources!

In our continued quest to give our members the best data possible, we’ve added 417 new cataloging sources from around the world to LibraryThing.

It’s a lot to take in at once. We’ve added or greatly increased our support in a number of areas; here are some of the highlights:

Chinese: Academica Sinica, Feng Chia University, Lingnan Uniersity, National Cheng-chi University Libraries, Zhejiang Provincial Library

Russian: Moskow Library Network, Russian State Library

Czech: NK Praha, VK Olomouc, Moravian Library in Brno, Mìstská knihovna Prostìjov

Thai: Srinakharinwirot University

Arabic: United Arab Emirates University, American University of Cairo, International Islamic University Malaysia

Portuguese: Sistema Integrado de Bibliotecas da Universidade de Lisboa, Biblioteca Municipal Manuel Teixeira Gomes, Biblioteca Municipal de Ponte de Lima

Lithuanian: National Library of Lithuania, Lithuanian Union Catalogue

Polish: National Library of Poland

Estonian: Estonian Union Catalog, Tartu University Library

German: Südwestdeutscer Bibliotheksverbund, Juristisches Seminar der Universität Tübingen, Universität Basel

Seminaries: Asbury College and Theological Seminary, Wheeling Jesuit University, Eastern Cluster of Lutheran Seminaries, Princeton Theological Seminary

Military libraries: United States Military Academy, United States Navel Academy

Colleges: Middlebury, Wellesley, Dartmouth, Carleton, Bard

Museums/Special collections: Smithsonian Institution Research Information System, Folger Shakespeare Library, Museum of Modern Art

Consortia/Union Catalogs: New England Library Consortium, SELCO, Merrimack Valley Library Consortium, LIBROS Consortium, MARMOT Consortium

Universities: McGill, Princeton, Georgetown, Duke, Rutgers, Ohio State, Colorado

Large public libraries: New York, San Francisco, Denver, D.C., Detroit, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Minneapolis

State Libraries: New York State Library, State Library of Florida, State Library of Pennsylvania, Texas State Library

That’s a pretty good mix, but the vast majority we added were US or Canadian libraries, even though we already had plenty of both. We’re still pretty weak in some areas, and completely missing in others. We use a protocol called Z39.50 to get book data from libraries. Quite simply, these are all the Z39.50 servers we could find info for and could get working with our software. We’d love to have thousands more, from all corners of the globe. Any library that has a Z39.50 server that would like to be on LibraryThing just needs to send me their connection info and I will add them.

All of these have been tested fairly thoroughly, but I’m sure there will be problems with some of them. Z39.50 is fickle and complex, and the servers are often unreliable. So some problems may be caused by misconfiguration on our part, and some may be due to circumstances and servers we can’t control. Let us know when there are problems, and we’ll do what we can.

Labels: milestones, new libraries, z39.50

Friday, March 28th, 2008

Series authors and work info in your catalog

I’ve added two small-ish features that point the way to other features:

Series Authors: Series pages now show all series authors, with photos if there are any. (The example below is from Star Wars.) Mouse-over a picture to get the name. In general, I want to move in the direction of graphical representations like this. I dislike profile pictures, but this is something different. It’s attractive, I think, and encourages people to add author photos.

Work info in you catalog: You can add the field “Work: Title and author” to your catalog display. In the example below you can see I have two copies of the work, the Histories and that my Penguin edition three Aeschyls play is otherwise known as the Oresteia. Incidentally, it cannot current sort by work title. If you sort by the “shared” column, however, it sorts by shared-copies which basically “groups” by work anyway.

Labels: new feature, new features, series, work pages

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Escaped Rhinos!

I just mis-posted here about our minimalist booth at the Public Library Association National Conference in Minneapolis. And, of course, as soon as I post it goes out to Google and all the RSS aggregators. So, my apologies for cluttering up your reader with rhinos.

I’ve posted it over on our ideas-and-libraries blog, Thingology instead.

Labels: librarything for libraries, PLA2008

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Series improvements

Chris and I have added two small but important features to LibraryThing’s amazing member-driven “series” feature (first blogged here).

First, authors now show series as well as works:

Second, I’ve added a page laying out all the series and series-books in your library. You can find it from your Profile tab under “statistics.” Here’s one from a user with many series, oakesspalding.

Oh, I forgot. FriendFeed, a fast-rising social-network aggregator I haven’t played with, added LibraryThing support a couple days ago.

Labels: new feature, new features, series

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

New JSON API

I’ve just blogged about a new Javascript/JSON API for work info over on Thingology, LibraryThing’s blog for ideas, issues, libraries and labs.

It’s mostly designed to make it easy for people to link to LibraryThing only when we have the book. You can also dress up the link with copy- and review-counts, and an average rating.

I think regular members will be more excited by a JSON API to your own books. This will allow us and members to write new widgets—widget for reviews, for example—and better widgets. I’m want to write them so that all the JavaScript code that comes out it is automatically shared between members, both legally and technically.

The work-info API is a first step. Let’s talk about this and what should come.

Labels: apis, json, widgets

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Twenty-five million books!

Back when we had five million books

We just hit 25,000,000 books.

It’s been a good week. LibraryThing and social cataloging were profiled on All Thing Considered and spent more than a day at the top of NPR’s most-emailed list. I was named a “Mover and Shaker” of the library world, a rare thing for a non-librarian. LibraryThing Local, only a few weeks old, hit 20,000 venues (now 23,000). Our Redesign LibraryThing project has been going well too. We unveiled a Bonus batch of free Early Reviewer books. And we opened up the LibraryThing Authors program. We’ve been unusually busy–my statistics (a new feature)—show I’ve already written more words on Talk than any other month, but also happy. And did I mention Casey got to talk about LibraryThing in Taiwan? Good times!

Suggestion contest: We’ve been casting around for an appropriate contest to commemorate the event. We’re going to give the book-pile contests a rest for a while; I’m not sure past winners can be topped. And although the LibraryThing haikus are one of my favorite parts of the site, many members find writing and poetry contests intimidating.

Instead, we’re going to make the contest about LibraryThing itself. I’ve opened up a Talk post: Ten ways to make LibraryThing better.

The rules are:

Post only once.
Provide no more than ten suggestions.
Keep the suggestions short–a few sentences at the most!
Focus on your suggestions, not on others’.

The suggestions can be of any kind. Technical requests–feature requests and bug fixes–are fine. But so are tips for how to promote LibraryThing or partnership ideas. You can mix them up–tell us to change the whole design around and go open source, and correct one small spelling error.

This is NOT a vote! You are free to post whatever suggestions you want, but we aren’t going to be tallying up how many times an idea is repeated. Instead, I see this as an opportunity to surface many ideas.

I’m asking that the main thread be kept clear of commentary; I’ve made a second thread for that.

At the end of our “Week of Twenty-Five Million Books” I’ll announce 25 winners. Fifteen will be randomly selected from members who posted. Ten will be selected for one or more of their suggestions. We’ll post our favorite suggestions on the blog, and get to work on at least some of them. Winners get a gift account, and their choice of:

A CueCat barcode scanner
A LibraryThing t-shirt.
First dibs on a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.*

The lucky member: The twenty-five millionth book was The Listerdale mystery, and other stories by Agatha Christie, added by LibraryThing member irkthepurist (Chris Browning). It was added at 2:47pm on Sunday. For his luck, irkthepurist gets a free membership, a CueCat barcode scanner and a t-shirt.

Look out LC! The next big milestone is going to be thirty and then thirty-two million books (specifically 32,124,001). The latter is the size of the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world. That’ll going to be something, isn’t it?

Update: I forgot Rosina Lippi’s banners!

*In case there’s a rush, we’ll allow no more than ten members to claim first dibs on an individual book. The individual must otherwise qualify. Unfortunately, we do not set the country restrictions, which are about who has publishing rights where.

Labels: contests, milestones, new feature, new features

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

Redesign update

A week ago, I invited LibraryThing members to redesign the site, opening up LibraryThing Zen Garden, a place to design and test new stylesheets for the site.

So far, some two dozen members have contributed CSS stylesheets and one, zanix, produced a highly original design, executed entirely in Photoshop. MarkBarnes, acting on a suggestion from Abby, produced a very attractive design, based on the design of Cork’d, “LibraryThing for wine.” All told, there have been some really interesting ideas, and fetching new color palates. I’m still not sure where to take the design, but it’s given me a lot to think about. (It’s certainly poointed out some structural problems with our mark-up too.)

Check out the designs here and the group Redesign LibraryThing! where they are being discussed. Here are some samples: