Archive for June, 2009

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Widget Contest Winners

Back in March we updated the widgets for sharing a bit of your LibraryThing library on your blog or other web page. We asked for your best widget design, and a bunch of you delivered the goods. I know its been over a month since the contest closed, and would like to assure you that this is at least 80% due to making cool new things for LibraryThing, and only 20% due to the creation of a company skateboarding gang. Such is Springtime.

First Prize. These five winners get a one year membership to the site. Transferable to a loved one if desired. Also their choice of a CueCat or t-shirt. The top 3 will go into the preset styles list on the make widget page.

paradoxosalpha‘s entry reminds me of a math classroom. I’m going to put it in the preset styles as “classroom.” Steal it.

Besides having a great comic collection, stephmo displays them with gusto. Many users do a cool things using the tags from their library to create themed widgets, with a background style to match. Look for it in the preset styles as “shazam.” Steal it.

gordon361 submits another one in green. The covers that float through here are often biographies, military, or history related, and they look very at home on this poker table green background. Its going in the presets as “Poker Table.” Steal it.

pratchettfan‘s widget looks very at home on his blog where it resides. I like his use of color matching.
http://pratchettfan.blogspot.com/ Steal it.

poxd painted outside the lines a bit, using our API and some code from Yahoo to create this. It was too good not to reward.

Second Prize. These 10 winners will recieve their choice of a CueCat or t-shirt.

In no particular order (links go to the widget):

Everyone who submitted to the Contest threads will recieve a laptop/car sticker, a real-world widget.

If you’re one of the entrants, send a comment to user timspalding or email info@librarything.com to claim your prize. Include your member name, mailing address, and choice of prize, if applicable.

(post by Luke, not Tim)

Labels: contests, widgets

posted by Tim @7:02 am 1 Comment »
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    • Monday, June 29th, 2009

    More servers, less sleep

    We just finished moving about a dozen of our original servers from our “colo” in Maine to one in Somerville, where another dozen were waiting. In the process, we’ve basically doubled our server power.

    We’re still waiting to get all our metrics back up, and we have a few weeks of retasking servers (a lot will be wearing different hats), but, so far, the results have been very encouraging. We are faster today, and will be getting faster tomorrow. We have a lot more memory, disk space and system redundancy too—so keep adding books.

    We’ve collected all our pictures on a Flickr tag Great LibraryThing Server Schlepp. Here are some of the better ones.

    The move was a group affair. Abby, Sonya, Mike, Dan and I did all the physical work. Our Australian systems administrator directed us by video chat—and burned through his monthly bandwidth doing it. Abby and I did a trial run with one server on Wednesday. The rest pulled an all-nighter, except Sonya who arrived like a well-rested and showered cavalry at 7am. When we were done, Mike and I went back to my parents’ in Cambridge and slept like logs. Abby, who was taking care of a toddler, stayed up the whole day. Ouch—and kudos to her.

    Labels: new features, servers

    posted by Tim @11:42 am 9 Comments »
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    • Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

    Reviews in many languages

    I’ve added a bunch of features around the language that members write reviews in.

    Reviews by language. The result is to make LibraryThing more attractive for non-English users—they now get reviews in their own language by default. A few languages, especially our Dutch, French and German sites, already have a decent number of reviews, and this should make it more fun for all non-English users to review books.

    For the English-only members, the feature is mostly negative—it’s now easy to screen out the clutter of reviews in languages you don’t understand.

    Most popular works have reviews in other languages. Something like the Da Vinci Code has reviews in thirteen languages, including twelve in Dutch, three in Swedish, two in Catalan and one in Greek! (“Un dels millors llibres que he llegit mai”, “Το λάτρεψα”—maybe it’s better in translation!)

    Reviews uClassified: Most reviews have already been assigned to a language. Rather than use the default language in LibraryThing profiles, which turns out to be very, very weakly related to the language members write their reviews in, I took advantage of the excellent language classification service offered by uClassify (uClassify.com). uClassify runs a Bayesian filter on a piece of text and sends back a list of languages, and confidence scores.

    It isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good. Only very high scores were accepted as definitive. Short reviews weren’t sent for the same. As a result, about 1/8 of LibraryThing’s 730,267 reviews remain as “not set.”

    Feature changes. A bunch.

    • You can now edit your reviews language everywhere you can edit or enter a review.
    • Your library statistics page (link) now shows how many reviews you’ve written in every language. Mostly importantly this shows the number of reviews that haven’t been assigned to a language.
    • For reviews going forward your default language is set on your account page.
    • The catalog now has a “Reviews language” field and a special search for all your reviews in a given language (eg., reviews in English, language not set). These links are available from your stats page).
    • You can Power Edit review languages, and when you’re looking at all your reviews in a language, if it differs from your default language, you will get a link to make all unset reviews be in your default language. For example, here are all your unset reviews (link).

    Statistics. The numbers turned out something like this.

    English/Unset: 650,988
    Dutch: 8,636
    French: 4,666
    German: 4,651
    Spanish: 4,463
    Italian: 2,876
    Swedish: 2,329
    Danish: 1,587
    Norwegian: 1,231
    Portuguese: 1,098
    Finnish: 662
    Catalan: 443
    Etc.

    To be done, talked about. As usual, there’s more to do. So far, there’s no good list of recent or top reviews by language. Come to discuss it on Talk and suggest other improvements.

    Labels: book reviews, catalan, french, german, greek, languages, new feature, new features

    posted by Tim @1:49 am 8 Comments »
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    • Friday, June 19th, 2009

    Flash-mob catalog party in Omaha

    Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts has planned a flash-mob cataloging party in Omaha, Nebraska on Wednesday, June 24th, between 9:30am and 5pm. They have a 600 volume library to catalog and can use all the help they can get. They recommend arriving between 9:30-10am, but come whenever for however long you can!

    Volunteers will be honored with a complimentary Bemis Center membership and some delicious snacks. Contact BemisCenter or email (info.bemis.centergmail.com) if you’re able to attend. Directions here on their website.

    Labels: flash-mob cataloging

    posted by Abby @9:34 pm 0 Comments »
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    • Friday, June 19th, 2009

    Project Managers Sought for OSC

    Due to an increase in work commitments for both Laena and David, new
    project managers are sought for the Open Shelves Classification project. Below is a status report of the project. Interested leaders should contact Tim Spalding (tim@librarything.com).

    OSC status report June 2009:

    One year into the project, here is what we have accomplished so far:
    -Many wide-ranging discussions were held in the LibraryThing Build
    the Open Shelves Classification group and the OSC blog.

    -Optional facets were agreed upon initially as the way to handle audience, format, and language.

    -An initial list of top level categories was compiled by the end of 2008 and put out for review.

    -In January 2009, LibraryThing members tested these categories by applying them to works in LibraryThing using the ClassifyThis feature.

    -In January, a brainstorming meeting was held at the ALA midwinter meeting and was attended by librarians and non-librarians.

    -In February, the feedback from the testing was used to further refine the top level categories.

    -Starting in February and running through May, small groups began to construct the secondary levels for certain categories.

    -Throughout the spring, Laena and David did outreach for the project, writing pieces for the PLA blog and the IFLA
    newsletter    , and reached out to libraries in an unsuccessful search for public library data.

    -In May, the current list of categories of the OSC was added to sandbox of the National Science Digital Library Metadata Registry.

    Categories with second levels in development:
    -Art
    -Biography & Autobiography
    -Design
    -Fiction
    -History
    -Performing Arts
    -Religion
    -Science

    After working on the project for a year, we have the following recommendations:
    -The project needs a steering committee structure for leadership. The
    project is too large in scope for one or two librarians to manage
    without other leadership.

    -More involvement and leadership from public librarians! They know
    the intended audience of the OSC best.

    Labels: open shelves classification, osc

    posted by LibraryThing @2:22 pm 0 Comments »
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