Archive for the ‘april fools’ Category

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

LibraryThing April Fools Joke is delayed

I’m sure you all enjoyed GMail Autopilot and learning you were Obama’s fourth cousin. But we at LibraryThing regret that our annual April Fools joke was delayed this year.

Luke “don’t bump my awesome widgets” Stevens, Chris “collections-or-die” Holland, Mike “Facebook-or-die” Bannister and I have decided that other priorities in high demand—so high it’s turning into Haiku—prevented us from spending the day tricking LibraryThing out with an OCLC logo, making all recommendations be for zombie books and suchnot.

Mike did succeed in injecting me onto every page of our development server, squeaking distortedly as a sort of drunk LibraryThing “clippy.” but it but it took too much bandwidth and was simply too horrible to inflict on all. Also, we don’t have a CEO. Also, Mike is fired.

So, we have decided to postpone our April Fools joke, reserving the right to fill your screen with unicorns (click “cornify”) or other such foolery at any point in the next twelve months!

Labels: april fools

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

Common Knowledge in your library

What just happened. Yesterday saw two huge announcements I’m loathe to “push down.”

(What it didn’t see was an April Fools message, although some took the 160% increase in sources for one! Does this mean we get to fool people later on this year?)

Common Knowledge in your library.

Today we’ve introduced our “Common Knowledge” feature directly into your catalog—allowing members to look at and edit series information, important places and the rest directly in their catalog.

To look at it, go to your catalog and choose the “edit” link to the right of the A, B, C, D, E styles. You’ll see a number of CK fields as options. To edit CK fields, just double-click in the cell. A CK editing “lightbox” will pop up (see right).

Some thoughts. On one level, this is a minor feature. The data was always a click away. But I suspect it will substantially change members’ relationship to Common Knowledge—and make it grow all the faster. Together with my introduction of pages for member’s series, CK now “does” something.

Caveats. Right now you can’t sort by CK fields, and you can’t search by them. Sorting is doable, although it will take some sort. Searching is going to be harder, frankly. But it’s not out of the question. Lastly, we still haven’t solved CK language issues, so you may get series information in a language you don’t understand.

Discuss it here
.

 

Labels: april fools, common knowledge, early reviewers, LTER, new feature, new features, new libraries

Sunday, April 1st, 2007

Six Degrees of April Fools

Our April Fool’s joke, LibraryThing buying out the name LibraryStuff, followed on the April-Fools-resignation of Library Stuff blogger Steven Cohen, who later posted about his new job at LibraryThing. Now the ALA has wrapped LibraryThing in another April Fools, announcing the Library of Congress’ decision to put Google in charge of all it’s cataloging. The post ends:

“The source also mentioned plans to migrate the OPAC to LibraryThing and turn the American Memory site into a Wiki.”*

I must say, getting mentioned by the ALA, even if as a joke, is a little thrilling. But it all comes around, since Steven Cohen said in Public Libraries magazine (March/April 2006), “I’ve seen the future of online catalogs, and its name is LibraryThing.” March/April, huh? Was he fooling?

*Sic on the caps on “Wiki.” Since American Memory is a product of the Federal Government, someone SHOULD make a wiki for it. I’m sure parts would get worse, but parts would also get better.

Labels: american memory, april fools, library of congress