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

10 Comments:

  1. revelshade says:

    This is a day that will long be remembered. LOTR can now contain FOTR, TT and ROTK. Ring the bells! Summon the minstrels! Slaughter a mumakil and prepare our largest roasting pit!

  2. Jan says:

    Thanks for all the hard work! This is great!!

  3. ssfletch says:

    Love the concept! When can we start adding new work-to-work connections? The link above is not active.

  4. Jeremy says:

    ssfletch – you can add anytime, via the work pages (the photo above is just an example).

  5. Sarah says:

    YES! This thing I have been waiting for for ages! WOOT! Thank you! Hugs for all!

  6. ssfletch says:

    I’m new to this Jeremy. Where are the work pages located. I did a search and came up with nada.

  7. Ana says:

    Wonderful! Thanks for the job.

  8. LitPeejster says:

    Wow, this is great! I’ve already added a work-to-work relationship. (It’s on each work page, you just need to scroll down a little)

  9. Daniel says:

    Will this progress to a dual work occurrence count; one of the work as described and an alternate including all instances where it is within another work?

    From this it becomes possible to generate a “compilation or separates” statistic per user / work / library etc… And I expect the potential for significantly different alternate most prevalent works list. (Hamlet jumping from 16k to 33k for example)

  10. Vic says:

    Any thought to including this work-to-work relationship in the “search your library” function? (If only for “contains” and “abridgement of”.)

    For example, I’d like to search for “Fellowship of the Ring” and find my “Lord of the Rings” collection.

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