Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

Edible Book Contest winners!

Thanks to everyone who entered our first virtual Edible Books Contest! We were delighted at the number and range of entries, and I think we’ll plan to do it again next year! Check out all of the entries in the gallery.

Without further ado, your winners …

The grand prize goes to TheCriticalTimes for this edible version of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, made of sponge cake and edible paper, complete with fondant Kraken.

Along with the honor and fame, TheCriticalTimes wins an LT t-shirt, stamp, and sticker, plus a CueCat and three lifetime gift memberships to LibraryThing!

We picked two runners-up: both will win their choice of an LT t-shirt, stamp, or CueCat, plus two lifetime gift memberships. The runners-up are Unexpected, for “The Luggage,” from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (chocolate cake with marzipan and “lots of little pink icing feet”) and mellu for this take on Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman, made of marzipan (with a real carrot nose!).

We also chose a couple of Honorable Mention winners; each will receive a lifetime gift membership. These are infomagnet for War and Pizza, and exlibrislady for the delicious-sounding (and looking!) Gregor and the Apple (“a crunchy peanut butter mousse covered in a hard chocolate shell on caramel feet. The plate is garnished with raspberry coulis and a single apple crisp. It must be eaten in a grey, bleak building while the rain falls dispassionately outside”).

I’ll be contacting the winners to claim their prizes.

Congratulations to our winners, thanks again to all the entrants, and watch for an announcement next spring for our second Edible Books contest!

Labels: contests, fun

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012

Harvard University’s 12 million records now in LibraryThing

Short version. Our “Overcat” search now includes 12.3 million records from Harvard University!

Long version. On April 24 the Harvard Library announced that more than 12 million MARC records from across its 73 libraries would be made available under the library’s Open Metadata policy and a Creative Commons 0 public domain license. The announcement stunned the library world, because Harvard went against the wishes of the shared-cataloging company OCLC, who have long sought to prevent libraries from releasing records in this way. (For background on OCLC’s efforts see past blog posts.)

It took a while to process, but we’ve finally completed adding all 12.3 million MARC records (3.1GB of bibliographic goodness!) to LibraryThing. They’ve gone into OverCat, our giant index of library records from around the world—now numbering more than 51 million records! As a result, when searching OverCat under “Add books,” you’ll now see results “from Harvard OpenMetadata.”

This release (“big data for books,” as David Weinberger calls it) is, to put it mildly, a Very Big Deal. Harvard’s collections are both deep and broad, covering a wide variety of languages, fields, and formats. The addition of these 12 million records to OverCat has significantly improved our capacity for the cataloging of scholarly and rare books, and greatly enhanced our coverage generally.

Kudos to Harvard for making this metadata available, and we hope that other libraries will follow suit.

For more on the metadata release, see Quentin Hardy’s New York Times blog post, the Dataset description, or the Open Metadata FAQ. And happy cataloging!

Come discuss here.


Harvard requests and we’re happy to add: The “Harvard University Open Metadata” records in OverCat contain information from the Harvard Library Bibliographic Dataset, which is provided by the Harvard Library under its Bibliographic Dataset Use Terms and includes data made available by, among others, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. and the Library of Congress.

Labels: cataloging, open data

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012

Summer internship at LibraryThing

Will you be around Portland, Maine this summer? Are you interested in libraries, programming, or website design? LibraryThing’s looking for a local intern (or two) to work on a variety of projects for us. Depending on your interests and skills, we may have you work on programming or design for LibraryThing.com; we’d also be interested in having some help on various Legacy Library projects, so if you have an interest in historical libraries and bibliography, we’d love to hear from you too!

Potential internship opportunities:

  • LibraryThing.com programmer. Build a new feature (or improve an existing one) for LibraryThing.
  • Designer-developer. Help LibraryThing plan its future look.
  • Legacy Libraries researcher/cataloger. Assist with research, cataloging and maintenance of the Legacy Libraries.

Skills

  • Programming. LibraryThing is made with PHP, mostly in non-OO code. We also use JavaScript and MySQL.
  • Design. The standard software and a keen eye.
  • Legacy Libraries, we’re looking for someone with an interest in library history and bibliographic description. You don’t need to have the programming and design skills mentioned above, but a familiarity with bibliographic databases and rare books is a must.
  • Bonus. Familiarity with LibraryThing itself would be extremely helpful.

Intangibles

  • We like to hire people who care about books and libraries, and believe in a open and humane vision of the future for both. We live to create technologies that make readers happy and keep libraries vital.
  • LibraryThing is an informal, high-pressure and high-energy environment. Programming is rapid, creative and unencumbered by process. We put a premium on speed and reliability, communication and responsibility.

Location

LibraryThing is headquartered in Portland, Maine. For these internships we’re looking for people who can be in the office regularly.

Compensation & Schedule

We’ll pay—minimum wage, but we’ll pay! We’ll work with you to come up with a suitable schedule for the summer, but ideally we’d like you to commit to about a month with us.

How to apply

Send an email and resume to jeremy@librarything.com. Instead of a cover letter, go through this blog post in your email, responding to it, especially the skills and intangibles part, and suggest some ways you could be useful or projects you’d love to work on. Include your availability for the summer months (June, July, August).

Labels: jobs

Monday, May 7th, 2012

May Early Reviewers batch is up!

The May 2012 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 100 books this month, and a grand total of 2,841 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it’s correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Tuesday, May 29th at 6 p.m. EDT.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, and more. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Taylor Trade Publishing Akashic Books Henry Holt and Company
Riverhead Books Lake Claremont Press Ballantine Books
Wilderness Press Ashland Creek Press Doubleday Books
Tundra Books South Dakota State Historical Society Press Random House
The Permanent Press Small Beer Press St. Martin’s Griffin
Exterminating Angel Press Touchstone Books Random House Canada
JournalStone Eerdmans Books for Young Readers Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Kayelle Press Random House Trade Paperbacks Putnam Books
Human Kinetics Heathrow Books William Morrow
Archipelago Books Talonbooks Leafwood Publishers
Palgrave Macmillan Safe Harbor Publishing Centrinian Publishing Ltd
BookViewCafe Bellevue Literary Press Quirk Books
McFarland Dragonfairy Press Kensington Publishing
Ingber Spiegel & Grau Stone House Press
Crux Publishing

Labels: early reviewers, LTER

Monday, May 7th, 2012

Reminder: Edible Books Contest!

Quick reminder: we’ll be accepting new entries for our Edible Books Contest until 4 p.m. EDT on Thursday, May 10.

See the contest announcement for all the details on entries, rules, prize information, etc. Or check out the entries submitted so far in the photo gallery.

Labels: contests, fun