We’ve added a new enhancement to LibraryThing for Libraries, which combines two complementary enhancements: Series and Awards.
The Series enhancement draws from more than 50,000 series, and displays it right in the catalog. We provide a short description of the series (where available) and any related series (for example, The Chronicles of Narnia in both chronological order and in publication order).
For a given book, we display the name of the series and then the titles of all the books within that series. As with all the LTFL enhancements, each title links to that book’s page within your catalog.
See, for example, the page for Thursday Next in Lost in a good book in the Chemeketa Cooperative Regional Library Service Catalog. The series enhancement (displayed on the left-hand side) tells you this book is in the Thursday Next series. Click that series name and you see the series browser, which displays all the titles in that series, and links to each book in the library’s catalog. If a library doesn’t have a given book, we still list it, but without a link.
Chemeketa has chosen just to show the title of the series in the catalog, but you can also configure the enhancement to show a few “preview titles” and then a show more button which launches the series browser (as in the Pink Carnation screenshot to the right).
Some more examples of the Series enhancement in action on these book pages:
The Awards enhancement taps into more than 25,000 awards and honors. It covers a huge range of awards, from the National Book Award and the Booker Prize to the Salon Book Award and New York Times Notable Book of the Year, or even Oprah’s Book Club selections.
See the awards on these books:
Put it in your OPAC
For ordering information contact Peder Christensen at Bowker—toll-free at 877-340-2400 or email Peder.Christensen@bowker.com.
Questions? email me (abby@librarything.com)
Labels: awards, librarything for libraries, LTFL, series
Nice, but where does the awards data come from? Not sure “Amazon’s Best Books of the Month” really rates with the Booker.
Rebecca – the Series and Awards data is added by our members, in a sort of fielded book wiki, and then vetted by us (“awards” containing only one book, for example, aren’t displayed here). You’re right though, Amazon’s Best Books is certainly on a different playing field from the Booker. We do let each library ‘moderate’ which series and awards they want to show in their catalog, so if you wanted to exclude Amazon’s Best Books, you could.
User-generated content is such as asset! Years ago I tried to do something similar for awards data in an online bookstore, and just gathering the data and keeping it up-to-date quickly became unmaintainable. We had to limit to a very short list that we thought our users would care about the most (mainly Hugo, Nebula and Edgar).
The award feature is very welcome. I was adding the Miles Franklin award winners and Booker prize winners in the Tags so I could sort and list by the awards, but now I don’t have to add them as a tag.
However, how can I use awards as a field at the top of the My books page where I can sort and search by cover, by title, by tag etc. Can I add Awards to the menu on the top?
The awards function is gr eat, saves me entering the award in the tag field. I have two suggestions- make it possible to have awards as a column heading in the main listing of my books, also use Nobel Laureate for Literature author as an award category. This will help those of us who collect by award winners or Nobel authors.