The new author image feature is going well, with 749 author images added so far. That’s enough to introduce your author gallery! (Or see mine.)
Archive for August, 2006
Monday, August 28th, 2006
Happy Birthday LibraryThing!
Today, LibraryThing turns one. Last week we had cupcakes in honor of the five millionth book being added; today, we celebrate with book piles!
The moment you’ve been waiting for—if you check the homepage, you’ll see the regular bookpile has been replaced with ottox’s winning submission, which came complete with a story! It was witty, relevant and brillant. Congrats to him.
We got a really good response to the birthday book pile contest. (So much that we’re inspired to make holiday-book pile contests a regular thing.) It was hard to pick just one to feature on the homepage for today. They were festive, interpretive, celebrations of growing older, and of classic youth. A special mention goes to lilithcat, whose photo was pure genius (hint: read the lined up words in the titles in a line down), but a little too blurry.
The two runners up, who each take home a year’s gift membership, were staffordcastle (look at the first letters of the
book titles) and, for the delectable combination of wit and photo retouching, Rachael (who also nailed us on a love of cupcakes)!
Thank you to everyone who entered—and to everyone on LibraryThing for reaching this milestone with us.
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Friday, August 25th, 2006
LibraryThing on whether Pluto is a planet
UPDATE: The backlash begins!
As many of you know, the International Astronomers Union recently voted to demote Pluto from its former planetary status. Librarians, or at least the Dewey Blog, have been following the debate for some time now. For Dewey the stakes are high. Books about Pluto are classed at 523.482, within “Trans-Uranian Planets,”* which is in “Planets of the Solar System” schedule. Is it time to reshelve?
Beyond Dewey, the Pluto vote raises many of the same issues as library classification in general. Both involve authority and are understood as binary. In general, the librarians have better intellectual grounds. A book must really reside on one shelf**, and who better to decide this than the people who use it everyday?
Meanwhile, the Pluto vote won’t affect any astronomers actual work, nor, say, the “findability” of Pluto for the rest of us. The vote is a classic “pseudo-event.” I for one don’t see why the IUA’s opinion—rather, the opinion of the 400-odd (of of 2,700) conference attendees who still remained on the last day—on the matter should be definitive.*** What do the astrologers, historians of science, linguists and poets have to say?
Or, for that matter, how about LibraryThing members? Funny you should ask!
| Related tags: planets | Related tags: Pluto |
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So you see, Pluto is “kind of” a planet. It’s not planetary enough to be included on the related tags for planet. But the related tags for Pluto include “planet.”
So, it’s “sort of” a planet. Or maybe it’s a planet, but not a very good example of one. That’s a perfect LibraryThing answer. Non-binary, non-authoritative. Pretty good answer though.
*Another item from the classification schedule revealed!
**And, under a physical card catalog, it must have a discrete number of subject cards.
***The Dewey blog takes it for granted that OCLC’s classification should be affected by the vote. The NYT reports that school publishers were holding up textbooks. Having been directly involved in the production of school textbooks, I say bullshit.
Labels: Uncategorized
Friday, August 25th, 2006
Author photos
Robyn has added a nifty author picture feature. As with many of LibraryThing’s cataloging features, users—that’s you—are encouraged to help.
Here are some of the recently uploaded pictures.
Anyone can add a picture, so long as you stay within the copyright guidelines. If problems arise, users can flag problemmatic pictures. There’s also an author pictures group for discussion.
As you might expect, finding a good, out-of-copyright image of, say, Charles Dickens is easy. Living authors are harder. Sometimes authors explicitly state that a set of pictures is released for promotional use. Flickr is a good source for author signing photos, although you have to be careful about the license. More often, the author (or photographer) needs to be asked. We’re coming up with an image-begging form letter thingamabrarians can send to their favorites.
Without clicking, how many of these can you name?
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Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006
Five million books!
Liam’s mom made the cupcakes.
LibraryThing has hit five million books. We hit four million on July 19. That’s one million books in just over a month!
The 5,000,000th book was Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family by Patricia Volk. It was entered at 4:02pm by cookingthebooks, “a theatre professional” and “Londoner by birth now living in rural Scotland.” Cookingthebooks already has a lifetime account, so we’ve sent a gift account.
More statistics:
- The five million books fall under some 1,157,797 distinct “works.” (All editions of the Odyssey are counted as a “work.”) There are 1,282,535 distinct ISBNs.
- LibraryThing users have added 6,930,554 tags to their books.
- By coincidence, we also hit 70,000 users today. The 70,000th user, jean_luc_carpentier, only entered three books. We gave him a free account too. Why not?
- If LibraryThing were compared to a traditional library–let the lovin’ begin!*–it would now be the 34th largest library in the United States, edging out the University of Virginia (source: ALA Fact Sheet 22).
- Less than 1% of the books in LibraryThing are by J. K. Rowling.
- More statistics here.
We’re having a party at headquarters tonight. We plan to have a go at some of the over-buy beer from the LibraryThing barbeque, plus cupcakes and pizza. We’ll post pictures when we’ve got them.
With apologies to all, we’re going to be insufferable from now until August 29th, when LibraryThing turns one year old. Although the blogosphere made LibraryThing–which has never advertised** or hired a PR firm–we’re still hoping for a New York Times article, or a mention on Slashdot or NPR. — Nancy Pearl! David Pogue! Where are you?! — We figure the confluence of five million books and our first anniversary might be the best shot we get.
ABBY SEZ: Remember the Birthday book pile contest!
*As has been pointed out, LibraryThing is not a “real” library. You can’t borrow books from it, for starters. We do, however, think LibraryThing has something to contribute to discussions going on in the library world. We’ll leave that for the Thingology blog, however, and to the handful of speaking events we’re scheduled at.***
**We did do Google Adsense for a few weeks. Meh.
***Check out where the Wisconsin Library Association is having it’s annual conference! Abby and I divvy up things so that she gets most of the library events, but nobody told me it was going to be at a water park!
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