Archive for the ‘flash-mob cataloging’ Category

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Reading Flash-Mob!

If you’re in or around LibraryThing’s home base in Portland, Maine, we hope you’ll join LibraryThing and the Maine Humanities Council for a “Reading Flash Mob,” on Thursday December 15, to coincide with Portland’s annual downtown Merry Madness festival! We’ll convene outside Longfellow Books at 5:00 p.m. and read in public until around 6:30 p.m. (and then we’ll do some shopping or grab a bite to eat).

RSVP on the Facebook page, or just let us know here that you’re coming. We hope to see you there!

Labels: flash-mob cataloging, maine, meet up

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

Occupy Libraries!

It’s been fascinating to watch the rise of libraries at the various Occupy sites around the world, particularly the impressively-large collection at Occupy Wall Street known as the People’s Library. We reached out and suggested a LibraryThing account for the collection, and the volunteer librarians in Zucotti Park responded enthusiastically.

The OWSLibrary catalog now includes more than 3,300 titles, and it’s quite a rich and varied collection (check out the tag mirror). We’ve got a Talk thread where members are posting the books they share with the library; as of this morning, I share 100 titles with them, everything from E.O. Wilson to Annie Dillard to Strunk & White. If you’re signed into LibraryThing, you can see what you share with the OWS Library here.

The OWSLibrary folks also have an active blog, Twitter, and Flickr presence (they’ve even got library stamps!). Many authors have visited to speak, lend support, and sign books, and there’s now even an Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology.

More than 1,300 writers have signed the Occupy Writers petition in support of the Occupy movement, including Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Junot Díaz and more.

You can read some good coverage of the Occupy library movement in American Libraries, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Wall Street Journal.

On Friday, local librarian JustinTheLibrarian, Tim and I went downtown on our lunch break and cataloged the Occupy Maine library, a small collection housed at Portland’s Spartan Grill restaurant (which also serves a very tasty gyro).

Occupy Sacramento’s library is also up on LibraryThing, and we’ve been in touch with various other Occupy libraries; if your city’s library joins up, we’d love to know about it!

While you may agree or disagree with the Occupy movement as a whole, we think what they’re doing with books and libraries is simply awesome. And we’re very happy to be a part of it.

Labels: cataloging, flash-mob cataloging, libraries

Friday, September 9th, 2011

Legacy Libraries updates: Arendt, Greene, Twain, Wilde

Some recent Library Library highlights:

Hannah Arendt: LTers pranogajec, rsterling, and mambo_taxi have completed the addition of political theorist Hannah Arendt’s 3,500+ books, which are currently in the collections of Bard College.

Graham Greene: Our flash-mob to finish up author Graham Greene’s catalog went very well, and Greene’s 2,500 titles now at Boston College have been completely entered. Thanks to the following LTers for their assistance: g062r (who began the project and added the first several hundred titles), plus ReneeGKC, jjmcgaffey, cinaedus, timspalding, jbd1, cartogis, melmmo, JustJoey4, DuneSherban, mandymarie20, Kaczencja, SassyLassy, flissp, rdurie, melmore, jcbrunner, anglemark, ansate, Wabbit98, UtopianPessimist, urland, arrwa, cpirmann, jburlinson, DanaW.

Mark Twain: Now underway as an effort of the Mark Twain Papers & Project, headed up by LTer skgoetz, Mark Twain’s Legacy Library catalog. Watch for new titles!

Oscar Wilde: Another Legacy Library now underway: the books entered so far are based on Thomas Wright’s book Oscar’s Books, with many more to come from other sources. LTer JDEllevsen began this catalog and will be augmenting it with additional data over time.

On the Libraries of Early America front, I recently finished up the library of Richard Henry Lee. He’s the 20th Signer of the Declaration of Independence with a completed LT library (see the full list here). And I’m currently going through a large database of 17th and 18th-century probate inventories from York County, Virginia to add information about libraries there. More data about early libraries continues to arrive every day!

Many thanks as always to all those helping out with the Legacy Libraries. For more info or to find out how you can help, see the homepage.

Labels: flash-mob cataloging, legacies, legacy libraries

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

Flash-mob catalog Graham Greene’s library!

Flash-mob time! Help us complete the Graham Greene Legacy Library catalog by assisting with the addition of the ~2,200 remaining titles.

Greene’s library, now in the collections of Boston College, is notable for the number of books containing Greene’s annotations and marginalia.

Many thanks to LTer g026r for getting this project started!

See the wiki page for details on how to help, or discuss on the Talk thread.

Labels: flash-mob cataloging, legacy libraries

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

Books in Space!

A small band of intrepid catalogers (benjclark, JBD1, 2wonderY, staffordcastle, and katya0133) did a mini-flash-mob catalog project this week that was out of this world … literally!*

Working from a list of books aboard the International Space Station in 2008, we were able to create a LibraryThing catalog for the space station’s leisure library (and since then we’ve been able to add some additional books from articles which mention books brought by visitors to the station). We’re definitely on the lookout for other books aboard the ISS (I even tweeted the station commander), so if you know of any, please let us know!

I have to say my favorite among the titles is Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days

* Sorry, I couldn’t help it.

Labels: flash-mob cataloging