Archive for the ‘new features’ Category

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

Feature: Where did you get your books?

By popular demand, I’ve added a feature for members to keep track of where they got their books. “From where?” takes two answers, either venues from LibraryThing Local, including bookstores and libraries, or “free text.”

You can find the feature:

By default, members’ “From where?” data is public—unless their account itself is set to “private.” If you want to record the information but not share it, you can do so. The option is available on your account page and when you add a “From where?” location under “Privacy.”

Come talk about it here.

Labels: new feature, new features

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

Physical description fields added

We’re currently rolling out to all members some brand-new fields for physical description:

  • pagination (both Roman- and Arabic-numeral)
  • height, length, and thickness*
  • weight
  • volumes

In addition to the six separate fields, available for display and sorting your books, there are also two summary fields. “Dimensions” summarizes height, length and thickness in a “8 x 10 x 1.5” format, and “physical summary” replicates the standard library-data format, displaying volume count, pagination, and the height of the book. The latter is also user editable.

The data comes comes either from the library or bookseller record you used to add your book, or, when data is missing, from the ISBN level. As elsewhere, data from your book is shown in black text, and data from another level is shown in green. The green text will turn black if you edit it or tab through the fields to confirm it.

You can edit all these new fields on either the book edit page or by adding them to “List” view on the “Your books” tab. To do that, click the little “gear” symbol on the top bar.**

Once added, double-clicking on any of these fields will bring up an “Edit Physical Properties” lightbox and allow you to make changes. There’s also an option there to convert the data for that record between pounds/inches and centimeters/kilograms, if you’re so inclined.

Naturally all these neat goodies lend themselves very well to cool statistics and charts, so we’ve also added a statistics/memes page. You can find yours here. If you’re not signed in, check out Tim’s here.

Find our how your books stack up (literally) against a hobbit, a giraffe, Michelangelo’s David, the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramid of Giza and so forth. Discover how many U-Haul book boxes it would take to pack your collection, or the value of your books’ weight in gold. If all the pages in all your books were laid out end-to-end, how far would they stretch? All that and more on the new stats page.

We’ve also included a handy chart showing how many of your books don’t contain data in these fields, in case you want to run off to grab the ruler and scale.

If these fields aren’t yet showing for you, they will be soon; you’ll receive a profile comment when the fields are available. Many thanks to the members of the Board for Extreme Thing Advances for their assistance with getting this feature ready!

Come discuss the new fields and the stats page in Talk.


* height = head to foot of spine; length = spine to fore-edge; thickness = “width” of the book on the shelf

** There’s also an option here to “Show volumes, pagination, dimensions and weight fields.” If you choose to hide them, they simply won’t display anywhere.

Labels: features, new features, statistics

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

Melvil Decimal System View in Your books

We’ve just added some handy new browsing functions to our Melvil Decimal System (MDS).

What is MDS? MDS is the Dewey Decimal System, Melvil Dewey’s innovative classification system, as it has been applied to books in LibraryThing members’ books. The base system is the Free Decimal System, a public domain classification created by John Mark Ockerbloom. The wording comes from out-of-copyright sources.

Here are some examples:

What’s new? You can now easily examine the MDS classifications of the books in your library, using the Melvil Decimal System view (accessible via the “Your books” tab; click the little divot to the right of Tags to show the available views).

When you click on one of the ten top-tier MDS classifications, you’ll see the books in your library which have been assigned to that level, and the second tier of MDS classifications will also display. You can continue drilling down through all five tiers of MDS classification.

See Tim’s books by MDS view at http://www.librarything.com/membermds/timspalding, or yours at
http://www.librarything.com/membermds/MEMBERNAME.

We’ll probably be adding some bells and whistles to this feature as we go forward. We’re planning to add a similar Library of Congress view of your library soon, so watch for that as well!

Come discuss in Talk.


Dewey, Dewey Decimal, Dewey Decimal Classification, DDC and OCLC are registered trademarks of OCLC. Read more about OCLC and the DDC on their website. LibraryThing is not affiliated with OCLC, but we have the same hatter.

Labels: features, member projects, new features

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

Lexile Measures in LibraryThing

We’ve just added MetaMetrics’ The Lexile Framework® for Reading, commonly known as “Lexile measures,” to LibraryThing. These offer another way for members to view their books—this time by reading level.

The feature. You can look at pages for any Lexile, or for a range of Lexile measures.

We’ve also added a view of all your Lexile measures:

You can, if you’d like, add the Lexile® measures column in Your books for easy viewing or sorting.

The Lexile measures in your catalog are based on more than 115,000 ISBNs to which Lexile measures have been assigned by MetaMetrics.

Background. Since LibraryThing was created we’ve drawn interest from teachers and school librarians. Our ease of use and advanced features have led a number of small schools to use us as their primary catalog, along with numerous classroom libraries and other collections. Many have, however, asked us to add something provided by other school-library systems, like Follett and Alexandria, namely Lexile® measures.

Lexile measures are based on the comprehensibility of the text—the lower the Lexile measure, the easier the book’s text is to comprehend. The official Lexile scale ranges from 200L to 1700L (see the Lexile map [PDF] for example texts), though actual Lexile measurements in LibraryThing range from 0L to 2000L. Check out Lexile.com for more on Lexile measures.

If you don’t want it… We recognize that Lexile measures are neither comprehensive or universally appreciated. We want to make them available to people who will find them useful, but hope they’ll be unobtrusive to others.

Come talk about it in the New Features group.

[Note: This post has been updated]

Labels: new feature, new features

Monday, April 4th, 2011

Introducing the Authors and Series views in Your books

Among the many things LibraryThing is—book recommendations, social networking and so forth—LibraryThing started out and and is a kick-ass tool for organizing your books. But we’re not resting on our laurels. There are things we can improve, and things we can add. This is one. Another one goes to the Beta group today.

This weekend I added a feature to see authors and series within the “Your library” tab, and as “first class things,” like books and tags, not just a field within books.

Access to the Authors and Series view can be found to the right of the Tags view. Click the little divot to show other views. (Yes, others are planned.)

Switching to Authors or Series view changes the bar:


Below that, the page changes to a list authors or series, with links to see them in your catalog or go to their stand-alone author or series pages.

The feature was introduced incrementally. There’s a Talk conversation that tracks that. Now that the feature is largely working and possibly complete, I’ve started another Talk conversation. Come let us me what you think.

Labels: authors, new feature, new features, series