Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

FRBR, OpenFRBR glug glug glug


Photo by yashima on Flickr

Check out the the most recent LibraryGeeks podcast, a conversation between Daniel Chudnov and William Denton. Denton, who writes the FRBR blog, recently announced the OpenFRBR project, a incipient—very incipient—effort to create “a complete free implementation of FRBR.”

If you don’t know, FRBR is a library-science idea that can relate books, starting from something like LibraryThing’s “works” concept, but attempting to do a great deal more. Although FRBR doens’t say prescribe one way, FRBRization of library data has tended to be done algorithmically. There are just too many books out there for librarians to revisit manually, and LibraryThing’s crowdsourcing solution has not caught on elsewhere.

Denton is a FRBR dynamo and whatever comes of it, I’m sure it will be interesting. I only wish he didn’t plan to do it in Ruby on Rails. Does the library tech world need another programming language to fit all its old data formats and communication protocols to? I also have philosophical problems with FRBR, for understanding relationships in mechanical, “binary” ways. (I’ve never managed to communicate this right.) Even so, LibraryThing will be watching closely how we can both help and use the OpenFRBR project.

Dan’s interviews are wonderfully offbeat—library technology meets the Charlie Rose Show. A good part is devoted to a series of standing questions, including “What do you want to hear when you arrive in heaven?” He did it to Abby and me and he does it with William—to the limit. It was recorded at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa last month during the Access 2006 conference. Music tinkles in the background. Waitresses come and go. The conversation is deep and interesting. It’s My Dinner With Andre!

At one point wine is ordered, and is poured deliciously into a glass right next the tape machine. Don’t listen to this podcast unless you have easy access to your own wine too—it’s torture.

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Thursday, November 9th, 2006

The LC’s new search

Check the Library of Congress’ new search, designated “beta.”

It’s got some great features:

  • “Federated” searching of different “buckets” of content, including the online catalog, prints and photographs, and the LC website.
  • A refreshingly clean, simple and attractive interface that works just as you expect—it’s Google-y!
  • Rather than wait for everything to come back from the different systems, the search results Ajax in. It’s slick, and a good way to avoid making the system hostage to whatever sub-service is sluggish that day.

Some drawbacks:

  • Eventually results dump you into the original systems. Obviously, they weren’t trying to reengineer everything. Maybe, if the elegant new search becomes popular, it will prompt action to improve the online catalog itself.
  • It presents only a few catalog results by default, and they aren’t relevancy-ranked. (I don’t think they’ve done anything to the search per se, but just “pulled it in” to the new UI.*) So, search for “cookery” (the LCSH term for “cooking”) and you get four hits, all in what I take to be Burmese, apparently because of character-set sorting issues. Just image if Google returned results like that!
  • “Word junk.” You don’t need to say “Note: These results are sorted in alphabetical order,” you can just say “These results are sorted in alphabtical order,” “Results in alphabetical order” or even “sorted alphabetically.”*** A little message below a heading and above a piece of content is by definition a note! Do street signs say “Street sign: Main Street”? Ditto messages like “Select Sources to Search” over a list of sources above a search box. Say “Select Sources,” “Search” or go cold-turkey. And, while we’re on the topic, someone should cut the capital-letter budget. Capital letters have a grammatical role in sentences. Treating them as all-purpose markers of authority and importance misunderstands orthography as design. In design, “header-ness” is communicated by size, positioning and other visual factors. In any case, Studies, Have Shown that Reading Slows Down When Information is put in Unnecessary Capital Letters. So, how are you doing?****
  • Brobdingnagian ULRs. 143 characters for an all-sources search on “cookery”? On the plus side, the URLs appear permanent, rather than the LC’s usual “expiring” URLs.

My criticism may be more verbose than my praise, but it doesn’t outweigh it. The LC’s new search is commendable effort to wrangle simplicity and elegance from systems not on speaking terms with either.

*From the error results, I’m wondering if they’re using Z39.50 to access their own catalog?
**Character-set sorting issues?
***LibraryThing would say “sort: title | author | date | scrumptuousness,” making a message double as a UI element; the new search has no alternate sorting, however.
****Pardon the rant. This is a real bête noire of mine.

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Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

APIs and easy linking page

Abby wrote up a page on LibraryThing’s APIs and “easy linking” methods. With luck, it will give these important features more prominence.

I particularly want to plug easy-linking, which is particularly great for bloggers—letting you reference books without doing a search on LT first. Basically, you can link to a work like these:

The latter is very flexible, you can even do something like

And it guesses well what you mean—in this case Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Labels: Uncategorized

Saturday, November 4th, 2006

Back from safari

So I’m back from my whirlwind trip to Wisconsin, where I spoke at WLA’s annual conference. Thank you everyone for such great hospitality (especially Nichole Fromm)! The Kalahari was the most bizarre place I’ve ever stayed – I missed the live baby lions that they bring in for photo shoots ($60 to get a photo of your kid with a cub – no joke), and I never ventured into the waterpark (the biggest indoor waterpark in America!), but at least I got to see the bellhops running around in safari gear, and to eat here. And my hotel room was huge. My apartment here in Boston would have literally fit inside this suite.

I also got to hang out on State Street in downtown Madison with Jessamyn and Nichole before flying back. We visited the Madison Public Library and the University of Wisconsin Madison Memorial Library, which was great. It was nice to see more of Wisconsin then the touristy Las Vegas-y Wisconsin Dells, where the conference was.

My talk went pretty well – I tried to balance demoing all the cool things that LibraryThing is and does with talking about some of the issues LibraryThing raises in the library world.

I talked a bunch about “harnessing collective intelligence” – letting users create and upload content, and how the wisdom of the masses is pretty damn impressive. LibraryThing is so powered by users. Users – you – translate the site into a staggering number of languages, you combine author names, tags, and works, you upload author photos (and go to great lengths to obtain permissions) – you make things more findable and accessible, and you contribute your knowledge and expertise, and that’s what makes LibraryThing.

I read an article on the plane on the way to Wisconsin about why people contribute to Wikipedia – why they spend 30+ hours a week writing for something with no bylines, and where someone else can wipe out all their hard work with a single stroke. What’s the motiviation to do that? (The article talked about the connection with how scientists view their work – contributing to a greater good, and receiving credit and acknowledgment for their work). And I think it’s a lot about becoming part of the online community. The more LT grows, the more I think about it as a community. When we launched Talk and Groups this summer, there was an explosion of TALK among you all. You clearly feel connected to each other, and to the LT community. I feel like we know some of you – Tim and I refer to you by your names on LibraryThing, we say “oh, did you see what she posted yesterday? She’s right, we should really start doing that / create that / change that.” And I love that about my job – that sense of community.

All in all – it was a great trip. I even got an elevator ride with Sandy Berman,! And the library of the International Crane Foundation – I’m waiting for you to create your non-profit organizational account!

Next up – I have to figure out what I’m going to say at NELINET’s “Reinventing the Library Catalog” – the panel includes John Blyberg, Michael Kaplan (Ex Libris), Gregory Crane (Tufts), and Laurie Allen (PennTags), so it should be a lot of fun.

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Saturday, November 4th, 2006

Getting Real, Getting an ISBN

I just received my copy of Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application by 37signals, presumably mostly Jason Fried. Getting Real was originally offered as a $19 PDF*. It’s now available for free in HTML. I ordered it from Lulu as a book. I like books.


Is it just me, or does Lulu remind you of Loompanics?**

Fried has a contrarian, but highly influential philosophy on web application development, encapsulated in phrases like “underdo your competitors,” “feature food” and “there’s nothing functional about a functional spec.” (A good introduction to Fried-ism is his talk “Lessons Learned Building Basecamp,” available as audio on IT Conversatios.) I find Fried a maddening mix of good and bad ideas, expressed with equal dogmatism. I disagree with him, but he’s sharpened my thinking. OPAC developers should read him and get scared that someone’s going to Basecamp the OPAC.

I’ll write a detailed review later, but I’ll start with appearances. Flipping through I’m annoyed at how flip and padded everything is. It reads like a speech. It bristles with paragraph-separated lists, long quotes from other books and miscellaneous indented matter. There are dozens of chapters and each one starts on a new page. The font’s too large, the margins too spacious. It’s like a teenager with a term paper that needs to be ten pages long. Whom are they kidding?

Finally, a LibraryThing raspberry for not having an ISBN. It’s called a book, it’s reviewed as a book, you can buy it as a book, but it has no ISBN? You can’t find Getting Real on Amazon, the LC—anywhere. Someone on LibraryThing entered it manually and others have been copying the record. (Copy my copy, it’s got better data.***) I guess ISBNs are another feature they’re underdoing.

*They apparently sold more than 20,000 copies. Since the PDF costs were zero, this nets a profit of $380,000. Did I mention I want to write a book about LibraryThing?
**That’s How to Start Your Own Country by Erwin S. Strauss, a guide and encyclopedia to “Micropatrological” projects, like Sealand and the Republic of Minerva. This is the sort of topic books used to be written about—now it’s web pages.
***Any catalogers want to help out by coming up with a reasonable Dewey and LCC?

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Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

Congratulations to Reddit

TechCruch breaks the news: Reddit has been acquired by Condé Nast. Reddit is a community-driven news and what’s-cool site—something like Digg, but better. (For starters, Reddit hasn’t hyped up an untrue story about one of LibraryThing’s competitors!) I’ve followed them for some time, ever since meeting the founders at a Paul Graham/Y Combinator event in Cambridge. I’m pleased good things happen to good people.*

UPDATE: See this blog post. They’re still rich, but it appears they’re going to be tortured with office nonsense until their get-out-of-jail date.

Apparently Reddit had a prior relationship with Conde Nast, making Lipstick.com, Reddit for celebrity news. It doesn’t have a lot of users yet, so I’m thinking a few hundred Thingamabrarians could get together and vote up our celebrity story—appearing in OK Magazine on the same page as Lindsay Lohan. Ready? Set? Go!

*I’m also impressed by their blog entry on the role of users in Reddit’s success (“we’re not kidding ourselves: you all have made it everything that it is”). Much more gracious than YouTube, IMHO.

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Sunday, October 29th, 2006

1,000 librarians / LibraryThing rumors

The Librarians who LibraryThing group now has 1,000 members. I ask you, can 1,000 librarians be wrong?

Not to bring up an example, but an alert LibraryThinger wrote us about some rumors circulating about LibraryThing, and given out at one of the many recent library conferences. Here are the rumors, and the truth behind them:

  1. LibraryThing was started by Simmons graduate students. False. LibraryThing was started by me, Tim Spalding, and I don’t have an MLS. Some months later, Abby, who has an MLS from Simmons, joined as LibraryThing’s first employee.*
  2. LibraryThing is staffed purely by librarians. False. Of three employees (me, Abby and Chris), Abby is the only librarian.
  3. LibraryThing gets its MARC records from OCLC. False. LibraryThing has expressed interest in working with OCLC, but we do not currently do so. LibraryThing gets its records directly from libraries’ who make their records available through Z39.50 connections. We connect to about 60 libraries and library consortia. The most commonly used of these is the Library of Congress.
  4. Abby and Tim know all the words to Hips Don’t Lie. No comment.

*The second employee was supposed to be a Simmons grad, but it fell through. We’ve found it very hard to hire library tech people. The best ones may not be paid what they’re worth, but convincing someone to leave a secure, 40-hour, sometimes unionized job at a library for a small startup that won’t pay you more, but where you are expected to work 80 hours per week, with no promise your job will be around in a year… well, it’s hard.

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Thursday, October 26th, 2006

Embedded Library and School Library Journal

Tim and I were at Tufts a couple of weeks ago for NEASIS&T’s “The Dawn of the Embedded Library” program – he was gave a talk, and I was on a panel with all the speakers at the end. It was a lot of fun, we got to hear from Annette Bailey and Godmar Back, creators of the LibX extension for Firefox (she created it for a job interview – how incredible is that?). Nicole Hennig was impressive – she’s doing all sorts of crazy things at MIT, trying out all sort of new tools, using bits and pieces and mash-ups, and putting themselves “where the users are.” The whole day was recorded, and the talks are all online at NEASIS&T’s blog. Thanks to Caryn Anderson for pulling the whole thing together!

The speaking tour has just begun – next week Tim’s off to talk to the Delaware Valley chapter of the ACRL about the future of the catalog, and I’ll be with the Wisconsin librarians at a water park. I mean, a conference. Then in November I’ll be part of “OPAC 2.0: Reinventing the Library Catalog” for NELINET. Any Thingamabrarians going to be at any of these? We really should start having meet-ups or something. The BBQ in Maine over the summer was fun.

In other belated news, LT made it into October’s issue of School Library Journal. In the article, “A Book Lover’s MySpace“, Kathy Ishizuka calls it “one of the Net’s sleeper hits, a testament to both the word-of-mouth power of the blogosphere and the enduring passion for books.” Not bad! Plus, if you can get ahold of the print copy, you get to see a photo of my shining face. She also includes a link to a podcast with John Klima, who’s using LT to recommend books to the teens in his library.

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Thursday, October 26th, 2006

Overheard at IDEA2006

From Bruce Sterling’s Wired blog post, Overheard at IDEA2006:

“They’re able to do things I’ve never seen any library do. LibraryThing moves at the speed of light.”

Well, whoever said that—even if you didn’t mean it—you made our week!

UPDATE: Aha! We found it. It’s from a talk Ed Vielmetti (Superpatron) gave at IDEA2006. The full quote is:

“LibraryThing moves at the speed of light compared to library vendors … [They’re] able to do things that I haven’t seen any library do.”

Also nice:

“Most library catalogs are not fun to browse through—you can sort of struggle to find what you want. I can spend hours on LibraryThing and come up with a huge list of ‘Oh, I wish I’d read that,’ ‘Do I have that book or do I need to check it out from the library?’ .. There’s a big opportunity for systemmatic change within libraries, to incorporate some of [these] ideas.”

Wow, and the admiration flows both ways. Wouldn’t it be great if every library in the country had someone like Vielmetti?—an unpaid, expert, passionate patron helping to move the library’s technology along. It’s almost unfair he’s in Ann Arbor. Without him they’d still be one of the most technologically vibrant libraries in the country. When the Revolution comes, comrades Vielmetti and Blyberg will be redistributed!

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Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

I smell a cease-and-desist letter

Have you seen MsDewey.com? It’s an odd, somewhat diverting “search engine,” with terrible results, but featuring a funny—and hot, albeit scary-hot—actress who flirts with you, insults you and generally hams it up to the questions you give her. Play around, but ones like “Kiss me!,” “How old are you?” and anything mentioning Bush have specific responses. The calculator to the right came out in order to insult my manhood!

Anyway, I’ll eat my socks if this thing doesn’t go down in a jiffy. Dewey is a registered trademark of OCLC, and trademarks—unlike patents and copyrights—must be actively defended if they are to remain valid. If OCLC doesn’t act, the Dewey Decimal System* could end up like the “elevator” trademark. Notably, OCLC sued the Library Hotel (OCLC Press Release), for daring to decorate and number its rooms by Dewey, citing the need for trademarks to be “vigorously defended.” After a public-relations debacle—OCLC sued them for three-times profits!—the parties settled.**

From a WhoIs search it appears the site as put together by San Francisco-based EVB. Searching some more, I discover that Microsoft has confessed to sponsoring the site, writing:

“Who says search can’t be fun? At Windows Live we are constantly exploring new and creative ways to promote our search offering and deliver relevant information in an interesting and engaging way. The Ms. Dewey website is just one example of these efforts.”

I’m AMAZED Microsoft would make a legal blunder like this. And if OCLC approved it, there’d be a ® symbol somewhere, don’t you think?

*I object on principle to the trademark, and to the IP issues generally. Melvil Dewey died in 1931. The core of the system long since passed into the public domain everywhere. You want more bitching? See here.
**Their press release quotes the hotel as saying:

“We do not believe that our use of the Dewey® trademarks in our beautiful boutique hotel near the New York Public Library infringes OCLC’s Dewey® trademarks. … But acknowledging OCLC’s Dewey® trademarks and making a charitable contribution to promote reading by children, rather than spending money litigating, seems to be a reasonable way to resolve this matter.”

Considering that everyone says that you only need to use the ® symbol once, having them use it three times in a row looks a tad forced.

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