Archive for the ‘ALA midwinter’ Category

Friday, January 18th, 2013

ALA Midwinter in Seattle – Free Exhibit Passes!

Kate and I will be heading to Seattle next week for ALA Midwinter. We’ll be setting up camp in booth 1108– just look for the giant inflatable giraffe if you can’t find us.

Are you in Seattle, or nearby, and want to get into the exhibit hall for free? I can help! We have free exhibit passes to give out: Click here to register.

The exhibit halls open Friday, January 25th at 5:30pm and close Monday the 28th at 2pm. So stop by our booth and say hi!

We will also be showing off a brand new LibraryThing for Libraries product (Book Display Widgets!) and upgrades to other features… More detailed announcements coming, or stop by the booth for a preview.

Labels: ALA midwinter, ALAMW13, Book Display Widgets, librarything for libraries

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Heading to Dallas (visit us at ALA Midwinter!)

Kate and I will be at ALA Midwinter in Dallas this weekend, stop by to say hi! We’ll be at booth 1650.

The exhibits are open from the evening of Friday the 20th through the afternoon of Monday the 23rd. If you’re in the area and weren’t planning on attending, we can offer some free passes to the exhibit hall (note, this will ONLY get you into the exhibit hall, not any of the conference sessions). Click here to get a free exhibit pass.

We also have a series of improvements and features we’re adding to Library Anywhere and to the LibraryThing for Libraries enhancements–watch the blog for more, or stop by the booth for a preview!

Labels: ALA midwinter, librarything for libraries, ltfl

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

ALA Midwinter—free exhibit passes

We’ll be at ALA Midwinter this weekend, and so should you! We have free passes to give out (to the exhibits only) if anyone in the Boston area wants to attend.

You just have to go here and register.

While you’re there, stop by to say hi. We’ll be in booth 1208—just look for the rhinos.

More announcements coming soon, including a few new LibraryThing for Libraries features, and an update on the party we’re hosting Saturday evening. Stay tuned.

Labels: ALA midwinter, librarything for libraries, ltfl, rhinos

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

ConferenceThing at ALA Midwinter

Announcing “ConferenceThing,” a free, mini-conference we’re organizing to coincide with ALA Midwinter in Boston.*

When: Friday, January 15, 2010
Where: South Boston, very close to ALA Midwinter
Structure: Mixed conference/unconference
Admission: Free

We’ve wanted to do something like this for ages. Now that ALA is in Boston, home for Abby and Sonya, and a short drive from the main office in Portland, ME, we have the chance to do it—and do it up. We’ve chosen Friday, before the exhibitions open at 5pm.**

What we’re planning:

  • “Higher-level” conversations about the topics we care about—Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and the future of libraries and books. Many librarians are ready to move past the basics. A lot of us now spend most of our time thinking about this stuff!
  • Learning, but no instruction. If you want to set up a Facebook page, get a book. If you want to talk about what works and what really doesn’t in library social media, show up.
  • Non-library people. The event will be open to everyone—LibraryThing members, librarians, etc. We’re going to bring some interesting bookstore and publishing people. We think we’re all in the same boat. And we’re drifting. Let’s talk about whom to eat first.
  • Some sort of LibraryThing meetup and ALA party. We’re looking around for something different. It might just be drinks at Bukowski’s, but we’re looking for something cooler. (We’re shooting for the Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose books LibraryThing members cataloged.)

What to do


*ConferenceThing is not affiliated with ALA Midwinter in any way, although we have the same tailor.
**Friday is also when most of the special sessions are planned. We’re bumping up against a couple of events, including some by our friends in LITA. We’re sorry about that, but there weren’t any better options.

Labels: ALA midwinter, ConferenceThing

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Open Shelves Classification: First draft live and at ALA Midwinter

If you’re at ALA Midwinter in Denver on Saturday, come talk about this interesting new project. See below for details.

Back in July I blogged to start something called the Open Shelves Classification, a free, crowdsourced alternative to the Dewey Decimal System, and created a Group for it. Soon afterward two librarians, Laena M. McCarthy of the Pratt Institute and David Conners of Haverford took over leadership of the project. For the past six months they and a growing contingent of LibraryThing members, some librarians, some not, have been working to come up with basic principles and working on pieces and on the numbering system. They’ve also done some interesting work testing the proposed top level against real library records. Much of their work is collected on the Open Shelves Classification Wiki. Laena did a nice post on the OSC on the Public Libary Association blog.

The OSC team has reached some agreement on a first drag of the “top level categories,” some fifty categories that, it is hoped, all books fit into somewhere. And you are invited to help classify works in LibraryThing!

Want to help? Go to a work page in LibraryThing and scroll down to the bottom. You’ll find a chart of the top-level categories. If you see a good match, click on it. You’ll be prompted to say whether you know the book yourself or not. And then you’ll get to see how your classification vote match up with anyone else on the site.

You can classify anything in LibraryThing. If you want to help the most, however, click the “Find a random work” link here or below the classification chart. It’ll take you to a random work, but also contrive to get multiple members classifying the same works. The idea is that it’ll give us a good idea what categories are easy and obvious, and which are causing doubt.

Whatever you find, come and talk about it on the Open Shelves Classification group.

In Denver on Saturday? Laena and David are going to be at the ALA Midwinter show in Denver this weekend. (So are Sonya, Casey and I.) To move the OSC along we reserved a conference room at the Courtyard Marriott (Google Maps) from 1-3pm on Saturday, January 24th. Anyone at ALA is invited to come, as indeed are regular LibraryThing members–the Courtyard is outside the velvet rope.

Labels: ala, ALA midwinter, alamw2009, Open Shelves Classification, OSC

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

LTFL at 33 34 36 / Abby and Tim at ALA

Casey has just updated our list of LibraryThing for Libraries customers. We’ve hit 33 libraries, which is wonderful. (See the full list.) With no sales force and only half a developer, that’s fantastic. LTFL is clearly starting to matter in the library world. We will be adding resources to it accordingly, and look forward to finding out more about what current and potential libraries want from it.

Not coincidentally, Abby and I are going to ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia. We didn’t buy a booth; they’ve expensive and tie you down a lot. Instead, we’ll be going to as many talks as we can, meeting with people and describing cheesesteaks as a “business expense.” If you’re at ALA and want to chat in passing or over a beer, let us know.

Contact details:
tim@librarything
abigail@librarything.com
cell: 207 272-0553 (note area code 207, not 208, as first posted!)

UPDATE: Thirty-FOUR. As Casey whooped: “I totally outsold Jesus” (source). Then Casey dropped dead.
UPDATE 2: Thirty six. Holy smokes.

Labels: ala, ALA midwinter, librarything for libraries, ltfl, ltfl libraries