Author Archive

Monday, March 30th, 2009

LibraryThing at Computers In Libraries 2009

LibraryThing, your favorite makers of libraries in computers, will be at Computers in Libraries this week. We’ll be passing out free stuff and showing off our new LibraryThing for Libraries feature so if you’re at CIL, stop by booth 214 and say hi. Unfortunately, we’re rhino-less this time, but we do have T-shirts and laptop stickers (and Tim.)

Our new feature allows our catalog enhancements to run even on items that don’t have an ISBN. Check it out in action on this 1948 edition of Tom Jones, or this 1937 edition of David Copperfield

There’s no ISBN on those items, but our code is still smart enough to load the right tags and recommendations info. It uses a combination of our new What Work API and the LibraryThing Connector (the JavaScript that powers LTFL) to pull title and author information out of the catalog’s HTML and then match it against our system. This new feature should help our academic libraries in particular, since they tend to have a lot of older pre-ISBN books.

Labels: apis, CIL, CIL2009, conference, librarything for libraries, rhinos

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Polaris support for LibraryThing for Libraries

Following on yesterday’s announcement of Koha support, we’re happy to announce that LibraryThing for Libraries catalog enhancements are now available for Polaris OPACs.

First off, we probably owe the Polaris people a public apology for this being such a long time coming. They first contacted me about integrating LTFL in their systems a year and a half ago, when we only had 5 or 6 customers. One of their libraries had asked about it, and as a company, they’ve decided to be incredibly responsive to the cutting edge things their libraries want to do. They’ve kept pushing us (on behalf of their customers), even as technical and non-technical obstacles (mostly non-technical) have prevented us from seeing it through.

It’s a great corporate philosophy, and far too rare in the library world. Now that everybody takes our phone calls and wants to work with us, they deserve a lot of credit from being down from day one. It’s unsurprising to me that they scored among the highest customer satisfaction of any commercial ILS vendor in a recent poll; clearly service is a high priority for them.

Want to see the catalog enhancements in action? Here are a couple of examples from our first Polaris customer to go live, Glendora Public Library: (dogs), (fantasy). Several more Polaris libraries are testng it.

Because of the way Polaris’ system works, you currently have to press the LibraryThing button to get the content for a particular item. In the next version of Polaris, not only with LTFL be installable without editing any template files, but there will be no LibraryThing button; our content will load when somebody clicks on the “full display” button. So far, we haven’t added review support, but we’re happy to do it if there are interested customers.

Currently we have two installation options: the first only requires a single line of code to be added to your templates, but it does the LibraryThing button instead of loading with the details. This is what Glendora is using. The other installation option (provided by an engineer at Polaris) requires more involved editing of their templates but makes the current version of Polaris work with LTFL like the forthcoming version will.

Interested in getting LibraryThing for Libraries for your Polaris catalog? Contact us through the Interested? form.

Labels: librarything for libraries, LTFL

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

669 Data Sources!

In our continued quest to give our members the best data possible, we’ve added 417 new cataloging sources from around the world to LibraryThing.

It’s a lot to take in at once. We’ve added or greatly increased our support in a number of areas; here are some of the highlights:

  • Chinese: Academica Sinica, Feng Chia University, Lingnan Uniersity, National Cheng-chi University Libraries, Zhejiang Provincial Library
  • Russian: Moskow Library Network, Russian State Library
  • Czech: NK Praha, VK Olomouc, Moravian Library in Brno, Mìstská knihovna Prostìjov
  • Thai: Srinakharinwirot University
  • Arabic: United Arab Emirates University, American University of Cairo, International Islamic University Malaysia
  • Portuguese: Sistema Integrado de Bibliotecas da Universidade de Lisboa, Biblioteca Municipal Manuel Teixeira Gomes, Biblioteca Municipal de Ponte de Lima
  • Lithuanian: National Library of Lithuania, Lithuanian Union Catalogue
  • Polish: National Library of Poland
  • Estonian: Estonian Union Catalog, Tartu University Library
  • German: Südwestdeutscer Bibliotheksverbund, Juristisches Seminar der Universität Tübingen, Universität Basel
  • Seminaries: Asbury College and Theological Seminary, Wheeling Jesuit University, Eastern Cluster of Lutheran Seminaries, Princeton Theological Seminary
  • Military libraries: United States Military Academy, United States Navel Academy
  • Colleges: Middlebury, Wellesley, Dartmouth, Carleton, Bard
  • Museums/Special collections: Smithsonian Institution Research Information System, Folger Shakespeare Library, Museum of Modern Art
  • Consortia/Union Catalogs: New England Library Consortium, SELCO, Merrimack Valley Library Consortium, LIBROS Consortium, MARMOT Consortium
  • Universities: McGill, Princeton, Georgetown, Duke, Rutgers, Ohio State, Colorado
  • Large public libraries: New York, San Francisco, Denver, D.C., Detroit, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Minneapolis
  • State Libraries: New York State Library, State Library of Florida, State Library of Pennsylvania, Texas State Library

That’s a pretty good mix, but the vast majority we added were US or Canadian libraries, even though we already had plenty of both. We’re still pretty weak in some areas, and completely missing in others. We use a protocol called Z39.50 to get book data from libraries. Quite simply, these are all the Z39.50 servers we could find info for and could get working with our software. We’d love to have thousands more, from all corners of the globe. Any library that has a Z39.50 server that would like to be on LibraryThing just needs to send me their connection info and I will add them.

All of these have been tested fairly thoroughly, but I’m sure there will be problems with some of them. Z39.50 is fickle and complex, and the servers are often unreliable. So some problems may be caused by misconfiguration on our part, and some may be due to circumstances and servers we can’t control. Let us know when there are problems, and we’ll do what we can.

Labels: milestones, new libraries, z39.50

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Taxation without web presentation

The Library of Congress recently signed a deal to accept 3 million dollars worth of “technology, services and funding” from Microsoft towards building a new website powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in. I (Casey) usually leave the blogging to Tim, but I’ve got to say something about this.

Microsoft, in general, is very good to libraries, and libraries are very good to them. Microsoft gets huge tax breaks for donating software licenses — something that doesn’t really cost them a thing — and libraries get software they couldn’t afford otherwise.

This is a different beast, however. It sounds like Microsoft technologies will be used from the ground-up — if you use Microsoft’s Silverlight to do the front-end, your developers pretty much have to use Visual Studio and Microsoft languages, your database admins have to use MS SQL Server, and your systems admins have to use Windows and IIS. In any case, it seems unlikely that Microsoft would consult on a project and not recommend you use Microsoft as much as possible.

Once you’re locked in to the entire Microsoft stack, you pretty much can’t change a single piece without completely redoing your entire IT operation from top-to-bottom. When the free deal expires or you need new servers, you end up having to buy new Microsoft licenses and software. It’s like giving somebody a kitten for a present — they’ll still be paying for and cleaning up after your gift 10 years from now.

Most disturbingly, users are locked in, too: anybody using an iPhone, an old version of Windows, any version of Linux, or any other operating system or device not supported by Silverlight will be unable to use the Library of Congress’ new website. How is that compatible with the principles of democracy or librarianship? It’s taxation without web presentation. And how exactly is that a quantum leap forward? (If the LOC really wanted to make a quantum leap, it would open up its data.)

Giant package deals are the wrong way to make both technical and business decisions about software; it doesn’t matter who’s doing the packaging, or how. You should be able to use the best operating system for the job, the best database for the job, and the best programming language for the job. You should be able to hire developers and systems administrators, not Microsoft developers and Windows administrators, and should give them the freedom to use the best solution, not the Microsoft solution. Sometimes the Microsoft solution is best, sometimes it isn’t, but that’s something that shouldn’t be dictated unilaterally.

“I take comfort when I see one of our competitors looking to hire Microsoft developers instead of software developers, for reasons the hacker/entrepreneur Paul Graham explained well:

If you ever do find yourself working for a startup, here’s a handy tip for evaluating competitors. Read their job listings. Everything else on their site may be stock photos or the prose equivalent, but the job listings have to be specific about what they want, or they’ll get the wrong candidates.”

“During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening– that’s starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.”

But it’s disappointing to see an institution you respect, admire, and fund with your tax dollars going down that same road. It’s even more disappointing because the Library of Congress does make smart decisions about technology. They announced another major project a few months back that took an entirely different approach to selecting the tools they would use. The people behind the World Digital Library sat down and thought about the best tools for the job, and they came up with an interesting and eclectic list: “python, django, postgres, jquery, solr, tilecache, ubuntu, trac, subversion, vmware”. Those tools are free, open-source, designed with developer productivity in mind, aren’t tightly linked to each other, and don’t inherently limit who can access your website. That’s what should matter.

Labels: library of congress, microsoft, open data, open source