Thanks to some fantastic work by Chris Holland (conceptdawg) we’ve just launched a brand new homepage for the Legacy Libraries project, chock full of interesting features and data:

http://www.librarything.com/legacylibraries

It includes the ability to search the contents of Legacy Libraries (LLs) as a whole or by selected subsets; you can also browse LLs by category (like Authors or Signers of the Declaration of Independence), and see a whole series of clouds about the libraries.

For each category of Legacy Library, like Authors, we’ve added new status markers (complete, in progress, proposed, unitemized), and you can sort each list by status, name, date, or library size.

We’ve also integrated data about the Legacy Libraries into a slightly modified version of Common Knowledge, so each library, regardless of completion status, now has an LLCK profile (here’s John Adams’) containing data about the person and their library (largely for cloud-creation purposes, among other things). Feel free to augment this data, but please do read the help page first, since there are some differences between this and the way other CK edits are done. Any questions, just let me know (jeremy@librarything.com, or jbd1 on LT).

This LLCK data allows us to do some really interesting things, like display proposed and unitemized libraries well for the first time (example) and also keep better track of project status. We also, at long last, have a way to highlight the many members of LT who’ve worked so hard on these projects over the (nearly) four years we’ve been cataloging Legacy Libraries (see the contributors cloud at the bottom of the page).

You’ll also notice some integration of these new features on profile and author pages, and Chris has whipped up a handy “Featured Legacy Libraries” module for your homepage (by default at the bottom of the right column).

For more on this, see the Talk thread, and as always, let me know if you have data on a library we should add or further information about any one already on our radar. Submissions of library data are always welcomed and appreciated!

Labels: common knowledge, legacies, legacy libraries