In light of a plan to create a “portable,” “branch-a-day library” in Portland, Maine–LibraryThing’s home–I’ve been thinking about the various possible sorts of “libraries outside of libraries.”

I am of two minds about such projects. I like to see interesting experiments, but dislike replacing valuable services. It doesn’t help that one of the two branches Portland is closing is in my neighborhood. As a branch, it wasn’t the best, but it would take quite a “portable library” to make up for it even so.

Nevertheless, I came up with a list of five types libraries outside of libraries (exluding what might be done with ebooks). Are there any I’m missing?

1. The Bookmobile.

2. The Short-Lived Library. Set up a branch library that lives for a defined period of time, like Boston’s Storefront Library. It’s like an “event store,” but a library. The Storefront Library was a big community success.

3. “Branch-for-a-day.” Find a bunch of spaces–empty storefronts, community center rooms or whatever–and roll full book carts into them on a schedule–Monday this neighborhood, Tuesday that neighborhood, etc. Has this ever been tried?

4. The Cafe Shelf. Set up mini-branches consisting of shelves–general or themed–in public commercial spaces, like coffee shops. The books would be owned but probably non-collection items. Care would be taken to tie all the books back to the main collection, with paper inserts or whatever.

5. The Vending-Machine Library. Like Conta Costa’s Library-a-Go-Go, a cross between Redbox and your library. It’s like a library, but with no pesky salaries and a terrible selection.

Thoughts?

The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records have changed direction.

Hat-tip: Karen Coyle.

Quick cross-post from the other LibraryThing blog:

There will be a flash-mob cataloging party in Chicago this Sunday, April 19th, at the the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. Read more here.

1. The iPhone Wheel:

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
Of course, every LibraryThing employee is a Mac person…

2. The Pomegranate

Would like some garlic fingers? BTW: Can you guess what this is advertising?

3. Who can forget If Amazon sucked like our old OPAC?

4. Someone should do a joke pomegranate-like OPAC video. It would start out with standard features, then add Web 2.0 features, like tagging, then searching everything every printed, then searching all TV shows, including never-aired episodes, then searching all conversations in Starbucks, Panera Bread and Roy Rogers, then searching all thoughts that took place within a meter of an iPhone, etc.

I’ve posted the following announcement on several rare book/library/American history listservs this morning as the official rollout of the Libraries of Early America project, an offshoot of the Legacy Libraries effort specifically for libraries created in America before c. 1825. Note: I’ve “blog-ified” the announcement here by adding additional links.

Have you ever wondered what books Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had in their personal libraries? How about 18th-century Virginia musician Cuthbert Ogle, or four generations of Mather family members? Or the most active female book collector in Virginia during the colonial/early national period, Lady Jean Skipwith?

A new project will make it possible to search, compare and study these and other Libraries of Early America. Using the book-cataloging website LibraryThing.com, scholars from institutions around the country (including Monticello, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society and others) have begun the process of creating digital catalogs of early American book collections – the project covers anyone who lived in America and collected primarily before 1825.

Is your institution home to any personal library collections or library inventories/book lists? Have you run across early American library catalogs (manuscript or printed) in the course of your research? We have begun compiling a list of collections to be added and are happy to receive further submissions.

Also, if your institution’s holdings include books from any of the personal libraries already completed or underway, we would be very interested to hear of them so that the records can be added to the database. While it will be impossible to catch every single book ever owned or read by these individuals, we intend to make these catalogs as complete as possible, so every title helps.

For more information, links, and so forth, please visit the Libraries of Early America group page. Feel free to ask any questions or offer any suggestions you have on the project, and if you’d like to volunteer, we’d love the assistance.

A propos of Jonathan Rochkind’s suggestion that MARC records contributed to OCLC include their own viral, but freeing, license…

Source: xkcd. Whether it’s it or me, I find xkcd funnier every day.

Something’s going on over at OCLC. And it looks very worrisome.

LibraryThing members who care about library data should gird their loins. Ditto those who support the Open Library project, and other efforts to free library data.

Note: Sorry I can’t give more details yet. I will when I can. So far it’s a mix of messages on AUTOCAT and phone calls I can’t disclose. Also, I’m figuring someone in the library world who has more access to OCLC communication will post about it soon. So far, no posts.

Updates: Will post ’em here:

• Talis blog
• Libology

Our first priority is to set the top level categories for the OSC.

Many ideas have been discussed in the thread on this topic, now it is time to test if these categories actually represent the holdings of public libraries.

We need volunteers to take the working list of top level categories listed in the wiki (http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.p…) and look at online catalogs for public libraries. Most online catalogs will allow you to search by Dewey Call Number, so Laena is going through and finding the correlating Dewey Numbers for each of the top level categories. She should be done this later today and will post the information to the wiki. Please search by Dewey Numbers correlated to our top level categories and then report on the wiki how many books turn up for each category. You will need to figure out how to search using wildcards in your catalog so that you turn up books will longer Dewey Numbers as well.

Once we have this information, we can then evaluate if the working list of top level categories needs to be edited.

The 2008 BookFinder Report is now out. The report, compiled by the staff of BookFinder.com, a cross-site used-book search service, tracks hot used books.

On top of the “Arts” section for the fifth year—Madonna’s Sex. I’m not sure why. LibraryThing members rate it pretty poorly.

Then again, it’s bound in metal…

Check it out: http://report.bookfinder.com/2008/

I love the Despair, Inc. posters, so this library-related riff got to me.

Poster by Darien superstar John Blyberg (CC-Attribution); hat-tip Michael Stephens.

I’ve wondered if lamination and similar protective techniques in libraries don’t encourage the very disaster they anticipate—”Oh, the book has a plastic cover on it? I guess that means its okay if I read it while eating a meatball sub!”