Archive for the ‘librarything for libraries’ Category

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Improved support for Koha

Setting up LibraryThing for Libraries in Koha is now a only couple of clicks away!

The 3.2 version of Koha (which isn’t out yet) will include the improved integration for LTFL. If you are using Koha without a host, and run on the bleeding edge, you can try it now via Git.

What this does is enable and disable LTFL through the Koha Enhanced Content system preference page. Simply enter your LTFL account number (found on your LibraryThing for Libraries Account page), decide where you’d like LTFL content to display (in tabs or under other bibliographic details) and enable it. No need to edit Koha templates.

The work to make this possible was initiated by me and extended and improved by Chris Hyde of East Brunswick Public Library. Thanks, Chris!

Labels: koha, librarything for libraries, ltfl

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

LTFL webinar by WiLS

There will be a webinar* on LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL) from Wisconsin Library Services (WiLS).

Details: Thursday April 9th, 2009, 2:00 – 3:00 pm, Central Time
Blog post here | Sign-up info here

Jenny Schmidt (SWITCH consortium) and Ingrid Lebolt (Arlington Heights Memorial Library) will be explaining “how LTFL works and detail the process of implementing LTFL features into your library’s catalog (Web Opac).” WiLS hosts a series of webinars for libraries.

Note: this is one in a series of webinars, all which cost smallish amounts of money.

Both speakers work at libraries using LTFL (see the whole list here). I have a long-standing love for the Arlington Heights library. They were an early adopter of LTFL, and of good things in general. Here’s their LibraryThing Local page, and a picture of me standing outside their building (to corroborate my story). The far-away half of my family lived there, and I grew up going to AHML when I’d visit.

*definition of ‘web conference/webinar’

Labels: librarything for libraries, ltfl, webinars

Monday, March 30th, 2009

LibraryThing at Computers In Libraries 2009

LibraryThing, your favorite makers of libraries in computers, will be at Computers in Libraries this week. We’ll be passing out free stuff and showing off our new LibraryThing for Libraries feature so if you’re at CIL, stop by booth 214 and say hi. Unfortunately, we’re rhino-less this time, but we do have T-shirts and laptop stickers (and Tim.)

Our new feature allows our catalog enhancements to run even on items that don’t have an ISBN. Check it out in action on this 1948 edition of Tom Jones, or this 1937 edition of David Copperfield

There’s no ISBN on those items, but our code is still smart enough to load the right tags and recommendations info. It uses a combination of our new What Work API and the LibraryThing Connector (the JavaScript that powers LTFL) to pull title and author information out of the catalog’s HTML and then match it against our system. This new feature should help our academic libraries in particular, since they tend to have a lot of older pre-ISBN books.

Labels: apis, CIL, CIL2009, conference, librarything for libraries, rhinos

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Polaris support for LibraryThing for Libraries

Following on yesterday’s announcement of Koha support, we’re happy to announce that LibraryThing for Libraries catalog enhancements are now available for Polaris OPACs.

First off, we probably owe the Polaris people a public apology for this being such a long time coming. They first contacted me about integrating LTFL in their systems a year and a half ago, when we only had 5 or 6 customers. One of their libraries had asked about it, and as a company, they’ve decided to be incredibly responsive to the cutting edge things their libraries want to do. They’ve kept pushing us (on behalf of their customers), even as technical and non-technical obstacles (mostly non-technical) have prevented us from seeing it through.

It’s a great corporate philosophy, and far too rare in the library world. Now that everybody takes our phone calls and wants to work with us, they deserve a lot of credit from being down from day one. It’s unsurprising to me that they scored among the highest customer satisfaction of any commercial ILS vendor in a recent poll; clearly service is a high priority for them.

Want to see the catalog enhancements in action? Here are a couple of examples from our first Polaris customer to go live, Glendora Public Library: (dogs), (fantasy). Several more Polaris libraries are testng it.

Because of the way Polaris’ system works, you currently have to press the LibraryThing button to get the content for a particular item. In the next version of Polaris, not only with LTFL be installable without editing any template files, but there will be no LibraryThing button; our content will load when somebody clicks on the “full display” button. So far, we haven’t added review support, but we’re happy to do it if there are interested customers.

Currently we have two installation options: the first only requires a single line of code to be added to your templates, but it does the LibraryThing button instead of loading with the details. This is what Glendora is using. The other installation option (provided by an engineer at Polaris) requires more involved editing of their templates but makes the current version of Polaris work with LTFL like the forthcoming version will.

Interested in getting LibraryThing for Libraries for your Polaris catalog? Contact us through the Interested? form.

Labels: librarything for libraries, ltfl

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Koha Support / Introducing Chris Catalfo

LibraryThing for Libraries, our innovative project to put tags, recommendation, reviews and other great enhancements inside the library catalog, now supports Koha.

You can see a quick demo of LibraryThing for Libraries/Koha integration.

The “library” has only seven books and is not as “pretty” as it could be. And there’s some question whether to integrate our tags into Koha’s tags–sometimes worse, sometimes better. But anyway, the beauty is all underneath—our code brings LibraryThing content into Koha seamlessly and rapidly.

Koha (www.koha.org), is the first and most popular open-source ILS (Integrated Library System). Started in New Zealand, Koha development is a community affair, but it’s spearheaded by LibLime in the US. LibLime also provides support services for Koha, and develops other open-source products.

Koha (and LibLime) are emblematic of the positive changes that have been dawning over libraryland. It’s hard for technical people outside the library “industry” to imagine how backward library tech generally is—a layered mess of proprietary, stone-age solutions maintained by a dysfunctional relationship between vendors and libraries. Koha stands at the head of efforts to change that.

LibLime’s most audacious and hopeful project is not Koha, but ‡Biblios* (‡Biblios.org) and ‡Biblios.net (‡Biblios.net), respectively an open-source cataloging application and an open-data repository of bibliographic records. ‡Biblios was started by Chris Catalfo for the 2007 Google Summer of Code.

In essense, ‡Biblios is an open-source answer to OCLC Connexion, and ‡Biblios.net is an open-data answer to OCLC’s WorldCat. LibLime is too politic to state things so clearly, but together ‡Biblios and ‡Biblios.net are a serious challenge to that dysfunctional monopoly. (For background see my OCLC posts; for more on ‡Biblios see this blog post or this LJ article.)

Introducing Chris Catalfo! The Koha integration was done by LibraryThing’s newest employee, the aforementioned Chris Catalfo (member: ccatalfo), of ‡Biblios fame.

Chris joins LibraryThing from LibLime. (The two companies are still friends, we promise.) Before LibLime, Chris worked at the Johns Hopkins and UNCW libraries, and got his MLS at North Carolina Central University.** He also has a masters in Italian Literature, and lived in Florence, Italy. (He fits right in at LibraryThing; his favorite book is Historical Linguistics and Language Change!) He now lives in western Connecticut.

Chris is going to be working on LibraryThing for Libraries and on library data issues generally. He’s a library-technology nerd par excellence. As he put it to me, “I like library technology so much I put up a Z39.50 server to search my blog.” (Try it at chriscatalfo.com:2100/blog.)

The goal in hiring Casey, our first library developer, was to ramp up the library data generally. We did add more sources, and our MARC parsing got better, but we never took full advantage of the data. Casey is working on a number of projects to do just that.


*‡Biblios presents me, a typography nerd, with a rare opportunity—even necessity—of using the double dagger, or diesis. It gives me real pleasure. Should LibraryThing change its name to ‡LibraryThing?
**Chris is our third full-time MLS-card-carrying librarian; Abby and Sonya also have their MLSs. Abby and Chris both have two masters degrees, the bastards. Giovanni and Chris both speak Italian.

Labels: biblios, chris catalfo, koha, liblime, librarything for libraries

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Bowker/CIG news..

Over on the main blog, I wrote a long post about LibraryThing CIG/Bowker deal. It’s an excellent deal.

Read the details here.

Labels: Bowker, CIG, librarything for libraries

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

LTFL Reviews now works with iBistro and Voyager catalogs

When we decided to add Reviews as an enhancement to LibraryThing for Libraries, we wanted to work on just a few OPACs at a time.

Otherwise, it would be 2010 before we finished Reviews (and no one wanted that). We started with Horizon Information Portal and WebPac, for a number of reasons*. Next, we decided to get iBistro and Voyager† on board.

We’ve had a couple of iBistro libraries add the Reviews Enhancement, but no Voyager libraries are live yet. You can check out the full list here.

* We knew the systems well, many libraries use them, and who doesn’t like saying HIP?
† I can’t talk about that particular OPAC without pronouncing it ‘vee-ger’ in my head. I’m pretty sure it’s just me.

Labels: book reviews, enhancement, ExLibris, iBistro, librarything for libraries, ltfl, sirsidynix, Voyager

Monday, December 8th, 2008

Randolph County Public Library wins award for using LTFL


Congratulations are in order for the very hip (pun intended for you OPAC geeks) Randolph County Public Library for receiving the Outstanding Library Service Innovation Award from the North Carolina Public Library Directors Association (NCPLDA) for their implementation of LibraryThing for Libraries.

They also won the Outstanding Library Promotional Project Award for their electronic newsletter and email alert service.

Well done, Randolph County Public Library!

UPDATE:
Coverage in the Randolph Guide newspaper.

Labels: awards, librarything for libraries, ltfl, ltfl libraries, North Carolina, randolph county public library

Friday, October 24th, 2008

New: Recent library reviews widget

Following on the release of LibraryThing for Libraries’ new Reviews Enhancement, I’ve created a widget for libraries to show off their most recent reviews.

These are the three libraries that are live so far.

Recent reviews from High Plains Library District

Recent reviews from Los Gatos Public Library

Recent reviews from Mount Laurel Library

Update: Our Mount Laurel is having some trouble with book titles. We’ll fix it soon.

Labels: book reviews, librarything for libraries, widgets

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

Internet Librarian—help!

This blog rarely hosts up-to-the-minute reportage, but here it is: Internet Librarian is a bust!

Most everyone we see loves LibraryThing for Libraries and our new reviews feature (announced today)—but nobody’s here! There are only two rows for exhibitors, and attendees aren’t walking them. According to an unnamed source—unnamed because I don’t know his name—attendance is way down this year.

So, if you’re here, come by! We’d love to show you the remarkable new system we’ve built. And we’ve got laptop stickers, t-shirts and cuecats to give out. And we’ve got nothing to do tonight either. Last night Sonya and I had a business meeting at a Denny’s.

Don’t make us do that again!
Update: Things looked up for about 30 minutes.

Labels: il2008, internet librarians, librarything for libraries