Archive for the ‘milestones’ Category

Thursday, March 21st, 2013

Common Knowledge at 5 million!

Earlier in March, LibraryThing Common Knowledge hit five million edits (and flew right on by: another 53,000 have already been added since then!).

The five-millionth CK fact was … drum roll please … the term “American Revolution” added in the “Important events” field on Barbara Tuchman’s book The First Salute by member berry25. Hey berry25, want an LT t-shirt or a CueCat?

Common Knowledge? What’s that?

Common Knowledge, a part of LibraryThing since 2007, is our vast fielded wiki system of bookish data, capturing everything from characters (Frodo Baggins, C-3PO) to series and awards information to related movies, dedications, author information, and much, much more. See the wiki page for a full rundown.

Some of these pages are ridiculously, awesomely complex: check out the Star Wars series page, for example (872 works, with something like 70 sub-series!). To get a sense of the depth and breadth of everything included in Common Knowledge, check out the clouds page.

Who’s added all this info?

CK would not be the amazing resource that it is without the hard work of the many LibraryThing members responsible for those 5 million+ edits. (Back in 2007 Tim predicted it would prove “insanely addictive”, and that seems to have been spot-on). More than 1,000 LTers have contributed at least 600 edits, and some of the totals are extremely impressive. Here are the top five all-time CK contributors:

Can I contribute?

Please do! It’s super easy to add Common Knowledge data – you’ll see the fields at the bottom of every work or author page on LibraryThing. And if you have questions, thoughts, or suggestions, chime in over at the Common Knowledge, WikiThing, HelpThing group.

Here’s to you all, and here’s to five million more Common Knowledge contributions!

Labels: common knowledge, milestones

posted by Jeremy @11:49 am 5 Comments »
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    • Friday, November 20th, 2009

    50,000 Venues in LibraryThing Local

    During our mad rush to add all the used book stores at Abebooks.com (see blog post) and all the Barnes & Noble stores (see Talk thread), Dan added the 50,000th entry into LibraryThing Local.

    So what’s http://www.librarything.com/venue/50000? It’s Barnes & Noble in Morgantown, WV.

    There’s no photo up yet, if someone near Morgantown wants to go and take a picture with a piece of paper that says “50,000!” on it…

    Labels: librarything local, milestones, West Virginia

    posted by Sonya @5:01 pm 0 Comments »
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    • Friday, October 17th, 2008

    Bigger than the Library of Congress

    LOC photo taken by Abby, two days after LibraryThing
    became a “real company” in 2006

    LibraryThing now has 32,287,447 books cataloged—finally surpassing the number of books in the Library of Congress (32,124,001 according to the ALA Fact Sheet). We’ve been waiting for this for years, as we slowly made our way up the list. Alas, now that we’ve topped it, what have we to aspire towards?

    We’re not trying to say that LibraryThing compares with the LC, in a “real library” sense. We have, for example, 24,119 copies of Tolkien’s The Hobbit in LibraryThing, and 15,545 copies of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (and don’t even get me started on the Harry Potter books!* No real library stocks books in those kind of quantities!

    But the fun of LibraryThing isn’t just in the widely held books, it’s in those that are shared by only 10 or 20 other members. It’s easy to find someone who has read The Hobbit. Finding someone to discuss your more obscure books isn’t quite so simple. But on LibraryThing, you can. There are 8 members who list The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects—8 members who can find each other and have a common interest. The “long tail” of LibraryThing is long indeed.

    *See the top 1,000 books and authors here

    Labels: library of congress, milestones

    posted by Abby @3:59 pm 0 Comments »
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    • Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

    Thirty Million Books!

    LibraryThing has hit 30,000,000 books cataloged! We also recently hit 1,000,000 user-uploaded covers and 500,000 pieces of Common Knowledge data.* Tags stand just shy of 39 million.

    Thirty million—more specifically 30,011,748—was the number of books in the Library of Congress, the largest “real” library in the world. Having passed two and three—Harvard and the Boston Public Library—our sights were on the LC. But the LC grew and the number changed (see ALA fact sheet), and now they have 32,124,001 books (the one at the end is priceless). So it’ll be another month or so before we surpass them.**

    The thirty-millionth book was The Making of a Surgeon by William A. Nolan (Wikipedia). It was entered by new member RobGillespie, and tagged “biography, medicine, surgery.” Rob gets a free account.

    The Making of a Surgeon, a landmark 1968 personal account, represents one of LibraryThing’s strengths well. Amazon lists it at 393,843, but it’s 74,730 on LibraryThing and in 1,300 WorldCat libraries. So, while it may not be selling well this year, it’s on a lot of shelves and “in a lot of heads.” If your surgeon went to school in the 1970s, there’s a good chance he read it, much as doctor today might be reading Atul Gawande. One doctor-turned-novelist who read Nolen was Walker Percy, whose library members entered into LibraryThing. Small world.

    The book is even more appropriate in light of the current publisher, Mid-List Press. Mid-List, a Minnesota non-profit publisher***, focuses on a segment of the book world, arguing:

    “In the past, publishers built their reputations on midlist books. In recent years, however, such factors as the enormous prices paid for high-profile “frontlist” books and the growing domination of mass merchandisers have eaten away at the traditional support for the midlist.”

    My take is somewhat more optimistic—that the logic of the Long Tail is and will open up demand for mid-list and “bottom-of-list” titles. LibraryThing has a part in that too. One reason people read bestsellers is to talk about them with others. Sites like LibraryThing make it possible to have that sort of shared reading experience well down the Long Tail.

    The hub of the Hub of the universe (Credit)

    *In commemoration of the Common Knowledge milestone, we have released all the data VIA a free, creative-commons-licensed API. There’s more free data coming soon—rhymes with “hovers.” We’re doing load-testing now.
    **For the record, I am under no illusion LibraryThing is “as good” as the LC, or even as big in any real sense. For starters, we have a lot of duplicates—the unique count is more like five million. From a database and programming perspective, however, the number is fun.
    ***Among Mid-List’s many books, I noticed The Writers’ Brush (LT), a book of artwork by famous writers, which promises access to “the manuscript sketches that Fyodor Dostoevsky made of his characters, or the can-can dancers secretly drawn by Joseph Conrad.”

    Labels: milestones

    posted by Tim @2:57 pm 0 Comments »
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    • 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

    posted by Casey @12:47 am 1 Comment »
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