This weekend saw a huge surge in registration on cat.LibraryThing.com, our Catalan-language subsite—fully 1/5 of new members on Saturday.

The surge followed brief coverage on a Catalan news site, complete with a short video about us (see Google translation*). The story even got into the Legacy Library project.**

I hope we can encourage our Catalan visitors to stay, and help improve the site for themselves and others. Catalan has an exceedingly rich literary tradition and no doubt hundreds of thousands of bibliophiles. But you’re not going to find many Catalan books on Amazon and the sites that use it. LibraryThing, with access to over 690 libraries, including a union catalog of Catalonian universities, is an ideal place for Catalan-speakers to assemble, catalog their books and talk about literature.

So, Catalan speakers, apart from a president of LibraryThing who can write in Catalan***, what do you want? Are there any Catalan programmers out there who want to lend a hand in exchange for good will from your compatriots and cat.librarything.com revenues? (Seriously. We’re never going to get rich off this stuff. But we might get even more interesting.)

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*Google does Catalan now? Wonderful.
**Wouldn’t it be great to get the libraries of some famous Catalonians? Searches turned up a handful of printed catalogs in or about Catalan and the closely-related Occitan: 1, 2, 3, 4.
***We do have you surrounded, though. Abby has good French, Chris Italian, Giovanni Spanish and my Latin is decent.

Labels: catalan, internationalization