Archive for April, 2019

Tuesday, April 16th, 2019

Welcome Finnegan

Welcome to Finnegan Marcus de Bree, the newest LibraryThing baby! Finnegan was born on April 11 (5lbs 10 oz, 20.5 inches) to Kristi de Bree and her husband Chris.

Finnegan

You can see all past LibraryThing baby announcements here, going back 13 years to the birth of Tim’s son Liam!

Labels: LibraryThing babies

Tuesday, April 9th, 2019

TinyCat’s April Library of the Month: The Asian American Studies Program at Cornell University

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

In honor of School Library Month we’re featuring the Asian American Studies Program (AASP) at Cornell University, who’ve been with TinyCat since the beginning!

Program Manager of AASP Alexis Boyce was kind enough to answer my questions this month:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

Established in 1989, the Asian American Studies Resource Center at Cornell University serves both the campus and the surrounding Ithaca community. Library materials and media pertaining to Asian America are available for study, research, and viewing. The AASP collection includes over 1200 books, journals, periodicals, and music; over 300 films; and, thanks to TinyCat, is searchable online.

Tell us some interesting ways you support your community.

In addition to housing our online library catalogue, our website serves as a resource for students seeking internship and conference opportunities as well as those looking for courses or applying for a minor in Asian American Studies. Our study lounge is open five days a week and available for group study, organization meetings, film screenings, or just hanging out between classes, and many student groups and departments across campus use the space to advertise events, projects, and materials of interest.

The Resource Center is funded and managed by the Asian American Studies Program, which coordinates a wide range of programming throughout the year, but regularly hosts two weekly lunch series devoted to faculty, staff, and student presentations and discussions as well as a monthly Spam and Eggs Community Breakfast. All events are free and open to the public and take place in the Resource Center itself or across the hall in its conference room.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

The Resource Center employs a small group of student staff members, and each Monday, they choose a Book of the Week that reflects current events or what they are thinking about in general. The last selection was Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines by Warwick Anderson (image right). Students posted:

Colonial Pathologies details how Colonial doctors and scientists ‘began to focus on microbial pathogens as threats to the health of white colonists, they came to view the Filipino people as a contaminated race, and they launched public health initiatives to reform Filipinos’ personal hygiene practices and social conduct.’ Anderson’s work explains how race and medicine converged to form imperial policies that have had long-lasting effects on Filipino health practices.”

I love these posts for a lot of reasons. They encourage our student staff and their peers to independently engage with the library outside of their required reading and perhaps consider ideas they might not have otherwise encountered. The students also have a lot of fun with the accompanying pictures, usually pulling volunteers from whoever happens to be in the Resource Center at the time and having them strike a dramatic pose with that week’s selection. Posts go up on Facebook and Instagram, and always draw a lot of love from current students as well as alumni and faculty.

What’s a particular challenge you experience as a small library?

Our budget for new materials is relatively small, and we are located in an out-of-the-way part of campus, so people sometimes have some trouble finding us. But they are always delighted when they do.

What’s your favorite thing about TinyCat? Anything you’d love to add?

I really appreciate the service that TinyCat provides because it makes us more accessible for people. I’d like to be able to offer electronic versions of books as well in the future.


Want to learn more about the Cornell Asian American Studies Program? Follow them on Facebook and Instagram, visit their website here, and be sure to explore their library on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

Labels: libraries, Library of the Month, TinyCat

Monday, April 8th, 2019

TinyCat Turns Three

Happy 3rd Birthday to TinyCat! We’re proud to now serve over 1,000 small libraries with an affordable, sophisticated online catalog, best known for its ease of use and “the best, friendliest” customer support (so we’ve been told).

We’ve enjoyed getting to know the amazing TinyCat community through our Library of the Month features (in our TinyCat Post), and we look forward to welcoming many more libraries this year.

To help celebrate our birthday, we’ve got a little something for everyone now through the end of May:

LibraryThing Store Sale. Now through the end of April, get all of our TinyCat merchandise on sale, including library supplies like our CueCat scanners and barcode labels, through the LibraryThing Store.

The deals: TinyCat shirts are marked down to $10, tote bags are $18, TinyCat/LibraryThing coasters sets are $2, CueCats are $5, and barcode labels are $5 for your 1st packet and $4 thereafter.

Extended free trials for all organizations. Throughout the months of April and May, anyone who signs up for a free trial to TinyCat will get not just 30 but 90 days to explore everything TinyCat has to offer. This will give you plenty of time to catalog your collections on LibraryThing and see how well TinyCat shows them off, all while tracking any circulation and patron data you need. Sign up now.

Win a free year of TinyCat. As a little icing on the cake, we’re picking two TinyCat libraries from April and May to win a full year’s subscription! (With a special nod to School Library Month in April, one of the libraries will be educational.) Winners will be selected and announced in June.

Come and join the celebration—share some birthday love with us on Talk (adorable cat photos encouraged), and help spread the news with other small libraries you love!


Left image: one of our stylish TinyCat v-necks, available in the LT Store. (LT Developer/shirt model Chris Holland not included—sorry guys.)

Labels: birthday, sale, TinyCat, tshirts

Wednesday, April 3rd, 2019

April 2019 Early Reviewers

a href=”http://www.librarything.com/er/list”>Win free books from the April 2019 batch of Early Reviewer titles! We’ve got 131 books this month, and a grand total of 5,445 copies to give out.

Which books are you hoping to snag this month? Come tell us on Talk.

If you haven’t already, sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, please check your mailing/email address and make sure they’re correct.

» Request books here!

The deadline to request a copy is Monday, April 29th at 6pm EDT.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia, France, Germany, and many more. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Candlewick Press Candlewick Entertainment Walker Books US
Black Rose Writing Consortium Book Sales and Distribution Kaylie Jones Books
Chronicle Books Beacon Press William Morrow
World Weaver Press ECW Press Ballantine Books
Revell First Steps Publishing Mirror World Publishing
Timber Press Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc. Everything Goes Media
Unsolicited Press Prufrock Press Red Adept Publishing
Crystal Peake Publisher Rolling Wheelhouse Publishing Shaking the Tree Press
ClydeBank Media Tundra Books Puffin Books Canada
Frayed Edge Press Apex Publications Henry Holt and Company
CarTech Books Meerkat Press Touri Language Learning
Poolbeg Press Holland Park Press Harper Perennial
FYD Media, LLC Open Books Literary Wanderlust LLC
Tantor Media HighBridge Audio Zimbell House Publishing
Month9Books Tiny Fox Press Gibson House Press
Poise and Pen Publishing City Owl Press ScareStreet
NewCon Press Pulp Literature Press BookViewCafe
BHC Press

Labels: early reviewers, LTER