I’ve added some more statistics to the Zeitgeist page. I describe them below, and my opinion comes free!

50 Top taggers. Time to get recognized for your tagging. Carminowe has 23,000 tags!

50 Top-rated authors. I find this a bit ho-hum. Who are these people? And as for Anna Akhmatova—I guess if you like her, you like her.

50 Lowest-rated author. Why do people own books they hate? One factor is clearly “assigned books”—Hegel, Kant and Heidegger; partisans love them, but there are a lot of copies out there that have been flung across the room the night before the final exam. I think August Derleth falls under the category “completist disappointment.” Lovecraft fans feel compelled to own him, but he just isn’t that good. I don’t understand Catherine Coulter and Candace Bushnell. As far as Claude Levi-Strauss goes, what’s wrong with you people! 😉

Top 25 long tags. The top tags seems very monosyllabic, but LibraryThing users are fond of longer, descriptive tags. This is a sampling of tags of at least 25 letters.

This was “interstice” programming—the stuff I can get done between diaper changes. I’m just mining the database in interesting ways, not doing fundamentally new work. But more major changes are on the way. Suggestions, comments, attempts to persuade me that Akhmatova is great and Levi-Strauss bad are all encouraged.

Elle. I mentioned that Abebooks interviewed me for their new “Avid Collector” newsletter (sign-up / newsletter). I thought I’d add that I was pleased and surprised to discover their Avid Reader Bookclub is doing Elle by Douglas Glover. Glover, a Canadian novelist who won the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction for Elle, was my wife’s favorite writing teacher at Vermont College, and she gives Elle a big thumbs-up.

LibraryThing, PaperbackSwap, loaning and swapping. There’s been a lot of buzz about swap sites recently. Surely not all LibraryThing users would want to swap or loan their books with others, but 30,000 users and 2 million books is a very respectable starting-point for such a community. I approached arguably the top swap site, PaperbackSwap, to see if we could work together somehow. I’m thinking of some easy way to move books between systems, with perhaps some cross-listing or cross functionality; actually getting LibraryThing directly into the business of swapping is a bit daunting. I am, however, somewhat interested to see if an “InterLibraryThingLoan” system could work. Okay, I admit it, I just want to get my hands on that translation of Palaephatus…

I started a discussion about swapping, loaning and PaperbackSwap over on the Google Group. I’d love to hear more opinions, either in comments here, or over there.

Beta-licious. The blog MoMB, The Museum of Modern Betas, published a list of the most popular beta applications by the number of times they’ve been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. LibraryThing comes in number seventeen, in between Google Scholar and Blinklist, and above Frappr, Odeo, Rollyo and other beta royalty. This is particularly good in so far as I’ve never done one of those underhanded, unfair Post to Del.icio.us links. Er, scratch that.

That’s it for now. As many of you know, I’m still largely in crazy mode with my new child. I’ve managed to do some incremental things—eg., the new libraries—during interstices, but substantial work, particularly work requiring my full attention for more than ten minutes is on hold. I hope to get back in the saddle soon. They say the first month is the hardest…

I added ten eleven twelve new searchable libraries, bringing LibraryThing up to 47 libraries, plus the Amazons.

• MIT and Caltech. Technical and scientific heft.
• NIH / National Library of Medicine. Medical heft.
• National Art Library (UK). Art heft.
• NEBIS (Switzerland). Swiss catalog gathers holdings of some 60 member libraries, with material in German, Italian, French and—one imagines—Romansch.
• Bahria University, Pakistan. LibraryThing’s first Pakistani library.
• National Library of Poland. First Polish library. Some character problems. Poles are invited to tell me about them.
• Stockholm University. More Swedish books.
• Tufts University. It’s not my fault that Boston has so many open library-data servers.
• Boston Athenaeum. By popular request, I added one of my favorite libraries, Boston’s extraordinary private—yes, private—library, just steps from the State House.
• UPDATE: ILSCO. I’ve added ILCSO, the Illinois Libary Computer Systems Organization, a consortium of some 65 libraries, holding 32 million records. The libraries include Wheaton, DePaul, Illinois State, the University of Illinois, The Catholic Theological Union, and The Newberry Library, another great private library. ILSCO is also pretty fast, which helps.
• UPDATE: CISTI. Someone who works at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) suggested I add them—apparently they are “Canada’s National Science Lbrary”—and pointed me to connection info. Thanks! Others should feel free to do the same; the trick is: I need a z39.50 connection (I’ll consider SRU). Pointing me to the web catalog does no good.

Interesting trivia: The Athenaeum is one of those rare libraries that still uses the original “Cutter” classification, owing, I think, to the fact that its author, Charles Ammi Cutter, ran the place for almost three decades. I haven’t figured out how this is going to work in LibraryThing.

I was thinking of having a LibraryThing meetup at their weekly tea, to which members can invite non-members. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Abebook’s new email newsletter The Avid Collector includes a “collector profile” interview with me (yay!) in its Spring 2006, issue. You can read it by clicking on the links I just gave, or sign up for the newsletter by clicking this graphic I stole from them.

Talking about one’s books is even more fun than talking about oneself, so I was glad for the opportunity. And, of course, I got to drop the name of certain book-cataloging website and show off another picture of my dog, Axel. The newsletter also includes a collecting Q&A and good piece by Allan Stypeck of NPR’s The Book Guys and owner of Second Story Books, in DC (a favorite haunt when I lived there).

Classical noodling: Abe hyperlinked some of my books to searches on their site, including Palaephatus’ “On Incredible Tales” (Peri Apiston). The search gives no results because, as often happens with Greek and Latin works, the English title is quicksand—the only available English-language edition being Bolchazy-Carducci’s text/translation titled “On Unbelievable Tales.” Try this Abebooks search for Palaephatus instead, which nets a couple copies of that edition, and also throws in Aldus Manutius’ 1505 first-ever printing of the text (together with Hyginus, Aratus, etc.) for a cool $2,750.

I found out it was the editio princeps from the Wikipedia article, lifted wholesale from my site, AncientLibrary.com, which reprints William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870). The Abebooks entry, from a bookstore in Culver City, CA, doesn’t mention that it’s the editio princeps, however, so maybe it’s more valuable than they realize. Which reminds me, I should have signed up to be an Abebooks associate when they asked me to do the interview. Generally I’ve been very lax about signing up for such programs—LibraryThing’s focus is not on “getting people out the door” to buy stuff. But that would be one sweet commission!

Three million tags. After getting the smack-down for daring to suggest (even in fun) that LibraryThing, with two million books, was now the 182th-largest library in the United States, I hesitate to proclaim that LibraryThing has more tags than any library in the world!

PLA. I managed to sneak down to Boston to catch the end of the Public Library Association’s 2006 conference. (A tip of the hat to my “connection,” who saw that I didn’t pay the full rate for what amounted to 1 1/2 hours of attendance and a Diet Pepsi.) Although I stupidly left my beautiful bookmark business cards at home, I managed to mention LibraryThing to a bunch of people. Nine in ten had never heard of it, but one in ten’s eyes lit up and they got effusive—a great sign, I think. I gave a well-received product demo to a library OPAC supplier. And I picked up information on getting some real-live LibraryThing library cards, which would be fun, if totally useless, I think. Were any other Thingamabrarians there?

Super-librarian Nancy Pearl talked at the PLA, but on Wednesday, so she dodged an abject plea for a NPR story on LibraryThing. Fortunately, I have the life-like Librarian Action Figure (“With Amazing Push-Button Shushing Action!”*), modeled directly after Ms. Pearl.

Nancy, if you’re reading this, does the word voodoo have any meaning for you?

*My wife got me her action figure under the false impression that it actually made shushing noises, or at least moved its “Shushing Action” under battery power, but it just sits there and you have to do both the shushing and the motion. Hey, what gives?