Archive for February, 2011

Monday, February 28th, 2011

February State of the Thing

This month’s State of the Thing, LibraryThing’s monthly newsletter of features, author interviews and various forms of bookish delight, should have arrived in your email inbox now! You can also read it online.

This month I talked to memoirist Wendy Burden about her book Dead End Gene Pool, just out in paperback from Gotham Books. I asked her about her collecting habits, her bookshelves, and her next book. Read the full interview.

We also have an interview with translator Alexander O. Smith about his recent translation of Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X and the translation process in particular. Many thanks to the LTers who assisted with this interview! Read the interview.

Read previous State of the Thing newsletters:

http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/State_of_the_Thing

If you don’t get State of the Thing, you can add it in your email preferences. You also have to have an email address listed.

Labels: state of the thing

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

Bookpile contest winners picked!

We’re now ready to announce the winners of our Non-English bookpiles contest, but before I do that, I need to first award the prizes for what is definitely the longest-running bookpile contest in LibraryThing history.

The winner of the 30-million book/LT’s 3rd birthday bookpile contest (yes, we’re now almost at 60 million books and have just passed the 5.5-year mark) is Flickr member asperschlager for “Colorful Book Pile.” Email me to claim your prizes (a CueCat, an LT t-shirt, and a gift membership. Please email me (jeremy@librarything.com) to claim your prize.

LTer kristenmm takes the runner-up prize for her book pile, which contains “titles that I think describe LT itself, its users, employees, or features.” Email me to claim your gift membership, and we’re going to send along a t-shirt too.

Thanks to all those who submitted entries, and we do apologize for the delay. Better late than never, right?

Now, on to the main event! We asked members to submit images of non-English bookpiles, for use on the homepages of the various language versions of LibraryThing (from Dutch and Catalan to Russian and Japanese).

We received more than 100 excellent entries via Flickr (browse the photostream) and in members’ LT galleries, covering at least 23 separate languages (plus polyglot). See the full list of languages here.

The winning images, as well as selected other submissions for each language, will go into a rotation on the homepage, so that visitors and members might see a different image each time the page is loaded. We’ll be doing something similar for the main site as well. When we launch the new sites, they’ll look a little something like this (the Swedish site):

Now: the list of winners! If your name is here, please send me an email or a profile message (jbd1) with your choice of either CueCat or LT t-shirt (and if t-shirt, whether you’d prefer black or red, and what size), and your mailing address. If you won more than once, you can have a combination of your choosing!

I’ve linked the language name to the winning picture:

We had a few entries in other languages that were out of focus just wouldn’t work for the homepage piles; we’d still like to have images for these and the rest of the languages, so please feel free to send along additional bookpile pictures! If we end up using them, we’ll send along a t-shirt.

And finally, the overall winner, claimant of both a CueCat and a t-shirt, is elfo, for the beautiful Spanish book pile at left.

Thanks to everyone for your entries, and we’ll let you know when the new homepage versions go live!

Labels: book pile, contests, cuecat

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

LTFL new grid display option

We’ve added a new and attractive way to display LTFL enhancements within your library catalog—we call it grid display. Basically, it lets you set a number of rows and columns, and display the data in a grid format. You can also try using  just one row and several columns to create a horizontal look. Ah, the possibilities are endless!

To turn it on: In the LTFL admin pages, click to the Configure page for one of the enhancements (Grid display works for Similar books and for Other editions and translations). Then just click yes to turn it on, and set the number of rows and columns you want. That’s it!

Screenshots: For contrast, below is the same set of similar books, shown in our original classic list view and in list view with covers (Turn covers on!).

Labels: librarything for libraries, LTFL

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

LibraryThing gets work-to-work relationships!

Today we’ve launched some new ways to display relationships between works.

The concept covers works that contain other works, or are contained by them. It also covers retellings, abridgments, parodies, commentaries on and so forth.

Thus, LibraryThing members will be able to add relationships that show:

A core concept here is that this is only for work-level relationships. Therefore, we are not doing “translation of,” “facsimile edition of,” etc. Members are asked to connect only existing works, not make up new, so-far uncataloged works.

Come discuss rules, concepts and ideas in the Talk topic.

We’ve got a lot more coming that builds and expands on these capabilities, so stay tuned!

Many thanks to the members of Board for Extreme Thing Advances group, who’ve been helping us develop and refine this feature. They have already added some 4,500 contains/contained-in relationships across LibraryThing.

Labels: cataloging, work pages, works

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

LibraryThing and FRBR?

Jeremy and I just finished writing a long post, LibraryThing dives into editions and expressions, laying out our plans to move LibraryThing to a new structure reminiscent in some ways of the FRBR system familiar to many librarians. Anyone interested in FRBR and cataloging might be interested in checking it out.

LibraryThing has long had a FRBR-like system, with three rather than four “levels,” and some differences in how the levels are conceived. The system is managed by members, and has achieved remarkable results. We believe, for example, that our ThingISBN service, produces better other-edition data for a book than OCLC’s xISBN service, which lacks user input. (Also, ours is free; they charge—but I digress.)

It’s time, however, to move to a more complex system, which can do everything members want to do. Go ahead and check out the discussion.

I posted here because I think the question should engage the larger library world. LibraryThing is a unique test-bed for ideas, and a potential source of both inspiration and actual organization for libraries.

Some questions for librarians:

1. How do you see the system agreeing with or differing from FRBR?
2. What FRBR-related ideas should we take a look at?
3. Which will happen first, RDA or LibraryThing’s new system? (joke)

Labels: cataloging, frbr