I added ten eleven twelve new searchable libraries, bringing LibraryThing up to 47 libraries, plus the Amazons.

• MIT and Caltech. Technical and scientific heft.
• NIH / National Library of Medicine. Medical heft.
• National Art Library (UK). Art heft.
• NEBIS (Switzerland). Swiss catalog gathers holdings of some 60 member libraries, with material in German, Italian, French and—one imagines—Romansch.
• Bahria University, Pakistan. LibraryThing’s first Pakistani library.
• National Library of Poland. First Polish library. Some character problems. Poles are invited to tell me about them.
• Stockholm University. More Swedish books.
• Tufts University. It’s not my fault that Boston has so many open library-data servers.
• Boston Athenaeum. By popular request, I added one of my favorite libraries, Boston’s extraordinary private—yes, private—library, just steps from the State House.
• UPDATE: ILSCO. I’ve added ILCSO, the Illinois Libary Computer Systems Organization, a consortium of some 65 libraries, holding 32 million records. The libraries include Wheaton, DePaul, Illinois State, the University of Illinois, The Catholic Theological Union, and The Newberry Library, another great private library. ILSCO is also pretty fast, which helps.
• UPDATE: CISTI. Someone who works at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) suggested I add them—apparently they are “Canada’s National Science Lbrary”—and pointed me to connection info. Thanks! Others should feel free to do the same; the trick is: I need a z39.50 connection (I’ll consider SRU). Pointing me to the web catalog does no good.

Interesting trivia: The Athenaeum is one of those rare libraries that still uses the original “Cutter” classification, owing, I think, to the fact that its author, Charles Ammi Cutter, ran the place for almost three decades. I haven’t figured out how this is going to work in LibraryThing.

I was thinking of having a LibraryThing meetup at their weekly tea, to which members can invite non-members. Wouldn’t that be fun?

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