April 5th marks five years since TinyCat’s official release, and the years have flown by for all of us at LibraryThing! The idea behind TinyCat was simple: we wanted to create an easy-to-use and affordable Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) for “tiny” libraries, those with under 20,000 titles. LibraryThing’s founder, Tim Spalding, did most of the coding while living in Kaş, Turkey, with developers Mike Topper and Chris Catalfo pitching in. Once the code was set, Chris Holland gave it the look you know and love today.
Once TinyCat went live, one of the first libraries to jump on board was Folio Seattle, a nonprofit member-supported library and cultural center in Seattle, Washington. Since then, libraries as diverse as the Library of Congress Young Readers Center, America’s Test Kitchen, and the Office of American Spaces, have joined us. We’ve helped thousands of educational, community, and religious libraries worldwide get their catalogs online with an easy management system.
So what’s next for TinyCat?
Our biggest goal for improving the TinyCat experience this year is finishing our major site redesign for the cataloging side of the system, LibraryThing, a project known more familiarly as “LT2”. With LT2, you’ll be able to manage your catalog in a mobile-friendly and more accessible way. It will also make future updates easier for us, meaning even more improvements over time. You can join our ongoing discussions and explore our latest releases by browsing our New Features Group on LT.
Birthday Giveaway and Store Sale! 
To celebrate our fifth birthday, we’re giving away five gorgeous TinyCat totes (in blue or red) to TinyCat subscribers during the month of April.
Here’s how to qualify:
- Have a current TinyCat subscription.
- Share your TinyCat library in a Tweet anytime through the end of April.
- Make sure to tag us @TinyCat_lib and add the #tinycatlibraries hashtag to your post.
- The giveaway ends on April 30, so be sure to get your Tweet out before then.
- We’ll call out five random tote winners from our @TinyCat_lib account throughout the next month. If we don’t call you out for the first (or second, or third, etc.) tote, you can share your library again to re-enter!
We’re also running a sale on all of our CueCat scanners and barcode labels in the LibraryThing Store for the month of April, so be sure to stock up: https://www.librarything.com/more/store.
Join our celebratory thread in the TinyCat Group for some happy birthday wishes! And thank you all for another great year.
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