Archive for the ‘birthday’ Category

Wednesday, April 5th, 2023

Happy 7th Birthday, TinyCat

It’s TinyCat‘s 7th birthday!

We started giving small libraries the best, most user-friendly and affordable library management solution—all powered by LibraryThing—back in 2016. With over 31,000 signups, we’re proud to help schools and classrooms, churches, game clubs, human rights groups, nonprofits, and so many other organizations with their lending libraries. (You can check out some of our featured Libraries of the Month on the blog.)

We look forward to continuing TinyCat’s growth with new features and improvements on both LibraryThing and TinyCat. Our latest developments on LibraryThing, on top of our “LT2” design upgrades, include spot-on New Recommendations and the ChatGPT-engineered “AI Search“. We’ve also been making lots of little tweaks and improvements to TinyCat this year with our newest developer @rebeccaamax, including a big feature that allows you to add multiple Admin Users to TinyCat.

To give you all our thanks during TinyCat’s birthday celebration, we have a couple of treats for you:

Store Sale

For the next month until Friday, May 5, we’re running a major sale on all of our CueCat scanners, barcode labels, and TinyCat merch in the LibraryThing Store.

Be sure to take advantage of the deals and stock up this month while you can: https://www.librarything.com/more/store.

“Books & Cats” TinyCat Giveaway

To celebrate 7 years, we’re giving away 7 prizes to our TinyCat members! 6 of our 7 winners—all chosen at random—will have the choice to receive a free set of TinyCat/LibraryThing coasters or a free TinyCat pin. The grand prize winner will receive our very last, organic-cotton, TinyCat tote bag in stock (pictured right), perfect for all of the book hauls and beach gear this summer.

Here’s how to enter the “Books & Cats” TinyCat Giveaway:

  • Give us your books & cats! Post a “shelfie”—a picture of your favorite bookshelf in your library—or a picture of your cat/s (we will accept other fur babies).
  • Post your pics in the TinyCat Group on this Talk thread, or tag @TinyCat_lib in a post on Twitter: just be sure to include a link to your TinyCat library too.
  • The deadline to enter your “Books & Cats” post is Friday, May 5 (23:59:00 EDT).
  • Want a bonus entry? Post a photo or two with your books AND cats (or fur babies).

Giveaway winners will be selected and notified the week of May 8. Best of luck, and thanks for another great year with TinyCat!

Labels: birthday, sale, TinyCat

Tuesday, April 5th, 2022

Happy 6th Birthday to TinyCat!

Today marks TinyCat’s 6th year of giving small libraries a sleek, user-friendly, and affordable way to manage and share their collections online, all powered by LibraryThing. Happy Birthday to us!

We’ve had the pleasure of cultivating relationships and community with thousands of libraries over the years. (Check out some of our latest Libraries of the Month on the blog.) From schools and classrooms to churches, arts organizations, local clubs, human rights groups, free libraries in underserved communities, and more, we’d like to thank everyone who’s adopted a TinyCat of their own! Of course this means we have a few gifts for you all this month to mark the occasion.

Store Sale…

For the next month until Friday, May 6, we’re running a major sale on all of our CueCat scanners, barcode labels, and TinyCat merch in the LibraryThing Store. Be sure to take advantage of the deals and stock up this month while you can: https://www.librarything.com/more/store.

...and a Surprise!

We’ll have an adorable surprise for you later this month, and a surprise giveaway for both new and existing TinyCat subscribers—well, a surprise in the sense that you can’t pinpoint* what the giveaway is, yet—so stay tuned on the blog and on our Twitter page for details: https://twitter.com/TinyCat_lib.

Come and join the celebratory thread in the TinyCat Group for some happy birthday wishes, and thanks for another great year!

*Hint hint: can you take a guess at the surprise we have in store for you?

Labels: birthday, libraries, sale, TinyCat

Monday, April 5th, 2021

TinyCat’s Fifth Birthday Celebration

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.

Labels: birthday, sale, TinyCat

Tuesday, April 14th, 2020

TinyCat Turns Four

Happy Fourth Birthday to TinyCat!

To celebrate our birthday, we’ve brought you new features and improvements, a short feedback survey with a chance to win a free year’s subscription to TinyCat, and a Store sale so you can stock up on library supplies.

New Features and Improvements

It’s our birthday and we want to celebrate! That’s why we have a slew of new features and upgrades for you. However, we want to acknowledge that not everything is cake and balloons right now, and we send well-wishes to our TinyCat members in this time of uncertainty. But it’s still our birthday and we do want to give you presents, so here we go.

LibraryThing developed TinyCat to be the leading professional, easy-to-use online catalog for small libraries that also didn’t break the budget. We’re proud to say that over four years and over 1,300 subscribers later, we’re still committed to providing the best and most affordable service out there for libraries looking to manage their collections and lending online.

We hope you enjoy the latest features and improvements that we’ve added (with Tiny Tutorials coming soon!) as our thanks to you:

Extend all due dates feature

“Extend all due dates” Feature

With the entire world currently in a social distancing state of life and libraries temporarily shuttered, we’ve added the ability for you to extend all due dates within your Active Transactions.

Clear Starred Lists

For visitors and patrons wanting to create multiple Starred Lists within TinyCat, we’ve now added a button to clear each list as needed, rather than waiting for a new browser session to do so.

Learn more about Starred Lists in our Tiny Tutorial here.

ICYMI: Transactions Reports

From the “Reports” page in the TinyCat Admin portal, you can now download automated checkout and patron reports from your lending history. You can filter by start and/or end dates, too, so you can look at a specific time frame when weeding the stacks, preparing reports for the budget, and more.

Patron Email Reminders for Checkouts

When you’re ready to return to your regular operations, you can have TinyCat send up to one checkout reminder email and up to three overdue emails to your patrons, making it easier to keep your collections intact.

Set your preferences from Circulation Settings.

Patron Notifications Expanded

All patrons will now get confirmation emails for every lending Transaction, including when they return an item and when an admin checks a book out to them.

Patron URLs Added to Notifications

Transaction notifications emailed to admins now include a direct link to the patron’s account, so you can quickly access more information for each patron as needed.

TinyCat Library Survey: Win a Free Year of TinyCat!

We want your feedback! So we can continue providing you with the best online catalog for your needs, please take a few minutes to fill out our survey and let us know what you think of TinyCat and how we can improve the service. And yes, we want to know how COVID-19 is affecting your operations, too. We’ll pick one library at random to receive a free year’s subscription to TinyCat as thanks for your time.

Take the survey here: https://forms.gle/Gi7bBwAysiWCZ7QC7.

LibraryThing Store Sale

With TinyCat’s birthday comes our major Store sale, now through the end of May.

Stock up on all CueCat barcode scanners for just $5 apiece and barcode labels—$5 for the first packet and $4 thereafter—for your library.

Head over to the LibraryThing Store: https://www.librarything.com/more/store.


Thanks for another successful year, libraries! Stay safe, stay strong, and read some books.

Labels: birthday, 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

Tuesday, August 29th, 2017

LibraryThing Turns 12!

Today is LibraryThing’s 12th anniversary! To celebrate, we held a cataloging race with our three key cataloging methods going head-to-head-to-head:

See the video to see who won (besides office assistant/dog Gunner, obviously).

Over the years, LibraryThing has evolved to focus on cataloging efficiency, to benefit data-lovers and libraries (hey there, TinyCat) everywhere. Today, we’ve got 12 years and 117 MILLION books’ worth of cataloging under our belt.

However you catalog, we’re happy you’re here with us. We’d like to send a huge “Thank you!” to all our members. You help make LT what it is—a great place to be.

Grab your party hat and come share in the celebration on Talk.

Labels: birthday

Monday, May 1st, 2017

Happy Birthday TinyCat! (and free t-shirts)

It’s officially been one year since LibraryThing released TinyCat—the smart, nimble, and adorably compact online catalog for tiny libraries! We’re proud to already serve hundreds of small libraries worldwide, and we appreciate all the great feedback we’ve gotten so far.

Here’s just a few of our favorite libraries using TinyCat today:

Folio_logo.jpgFolio Seattle Athenaeum. Seattle’s independent membership library joined TinyCat from the very start. They showcase collections donated by members and in turn provide a vital, bookish space that cultivates culture and community.

Unity Church. One of the many religious libraries joining us early on, Unity Church has a pretty expansive library including their Anderson Adult library, Whitman Children’s library, and coming soon—rare books catalog.

ATK_logo.jpgAmerica’s Test Kitchen. We’re thrilled to see ATK using TinyCat for their staff’s resource library—running through their many tasty collections is sure to give you some great recipe ideas (and a healthy appetite).

To help celebrate our birthday with all of you, we’ll be giving away LOTS of swag during the month of May. Come join the fun:

Sign up for TinyCat, get a t-shirt!* If you haven’t tried TinyCat out for your small library yet, now’s the time! We’ll pick one winner from our new sign ups, every day, to win a free TinyCat t-shirt of their choosing! You don’t even need an organizational library to sign up. And, yes, TinyCat is completely free for personal use.

Join one of our weekly webinars. We host live webinars every Wednesday at 1pm Eastern, for those who want a run-down of how to use TinyCat. Just follow us on Twitter for the link to our next webinar, posted every Wednesday, or head over to our WebEx page and search our upcoming meetings for “TinyCat”. We’ll send a free t-shirt to one of our new attendees every week!

Follow us! We’re hoping to have a surprise item or two in the mix towards the end of the month. Stay tuned on Twitter and in our TinyCat Group on LT.

Come and share some birthday love with us on Talk—adorable cat photos will be gladly accepted. We hope our next year welcomes even more small libraries in need of a great OPAC! Now, we must find cake.


*Right image: one of our stylish TinyCat shirts we’re giving away this month. (LT Developer/shirt model Chris Holland not included—sorry guys.)

Labels: birthday, TinyCat

Monday, September 14th, 2015

LibraryThing’s 10th Anniversary

Happy birthday to us! LibraryThing hits the big 1-0 today, with 10 years—and 99 MILLION books—of cataloging under our belts. As you can see, we’re all having our cake (and eating it, too) to celebrate.

Thanks to each and every one of you, and here’s to the next 10 years!

Come share in the warm fuzzies over on Talk.

For more about our Ten-Year Celebration, check out our new feature to enhance music and movie cataloging, and watch for our iPhone app, coming out shortly.

Labels: 10th anniversary, birthday

Saturday, August 29th, 2015

LibraryThing not ready for double digits

LibraryThing’s ten-year anniversary is officially postponed… for two weeks.

As some of you know, LibraryThing would be turning ten years old today. But summer vacations, family visits, and work stuff have have put us behind.

So, we’re moving the clock. (Yes, we can do that. We can do anything.) So today is NOT our tenth birthday party. Our ten-year celebration will be on Monday, September 14th.

Bring your party hat.

Labels: birthday

Thursday, August 30th, 2012

LibraryThing is Seven: Summon the AllThing!

LibraryThing’s employees (from left): Chris Catalfo, Abby, Jeremy, Kate, Brian, Tim, Mike, Chris Holland

LibraryThing turned seven today.(1) Seven years! It’s been a blink of time in my life, but it’s a long time, and positively an eternity online. Where so many of our 2005 web 2.0 cohort died, sold out or burned out, LibraryThing somehow survived. We’re stable, profitable and growing, with over 1.5 million members using LibraryThing.com and the other language sites, and over 400 library systems around the world using our library services.

Chris and Abby win.

Jeremy and Tim lose.

Chief praise goes to our members, the best book people I’ve met online. When LibraryThing went up I wasn’t sure that more than a few hundred people would ever want it. I’m happy I was wrong! After the members, LibraryThing was created by its employees. We’ve had many fine employees before, but I feel (and Abby and Chris H. agree) that we’ve got the best team we’ve ever had right now—a harmonious and balanced mix of talented people. Our most recent project, BookPsychic, solidified my feeling that we had it right. We know we’ve got a lot to do. I look forward to working with them. (You can see the team above.)

To talk about the future, the LibraryThing staff (minus one) came to Portland last week for what we’ve been calling AllThing12—a week of strategic discussions, user-interface arguing, employee scheduling, and lots of eating and drinking.(2) Families and friends came at the end, so we branched off into barbecue and sandcastles.

Some of our pictures can be seen here, at the AllThing12 gallery.

A few main points emerged, especially about LibraryThing.com development:

  • LibraryThing will live and prosper. It’s been rough at times, but we’re bullish on the future.
  • Taking the time for BookPsychic and another near-complete feature for libraries was worth it. They are models for future development, and potentially explosive products.
  • LibraryThing.com needs significant work, especially in fixing bugs and making good features better. Our design needs small but significant updates.
  • Our plans for mobile did not work out—the path we were going down is dead. Finding a new path must be a priority.
  • We crafted a new schedule whereby LibraryThing.com development is ramped up, with Tim recommitting his time and at least one of the other three programmers working with him at all times. Tim’s happy about this (so is Jeremy).
  • We have the development schedule through February plotted out. The two stand-out projects for LibraryThing.com will be in revising how members search for and add books, and getting it together on mobile.

All told, it was a great meeting. We made some strategic decisions, hammered out parts of the interfaces and planned for the future. And we reconnected socially—a vital task for a company that’s almost entirely virtual. We drank and made off-color jokes. We heedlessly mixed business and family. And when our director of HR fell off her chair, we laughed our heads off and took pictures—and we still have our jobs!


1. Or maybe yesterday. It’s not entirely clear.
2. Our sysadmin, Brian, in Kansas, had classes and wasn’t able to join us—so we video Skyped him in. Next time!

Labels: allthing, birthday, fun