Win free books from the July 2023 batch of Early Reviewer titles! We’ve got 148 books this month, and a grand total of 2,714 copies to give out. Which books are you hoping to snag this month? Come tell us on Talk.
The deadline to request a copy is Tuesday, July 25th at 6PM EDT.
Eligibility: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, the UK, Canada, Switzerland, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, Austria, New Zealand, Sweden and more. Make sure to check the message on each book to see if it can be sent to your country.
Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!
TinyCat’s Library of the Month is the Nancy & Joe McDonald Rainbow Library based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The library’s namesake, Nancy, is past National President of PFLAG and current President of PFLAG Tulsa. I had the pleasure of learning more about the library from Library Director Michelle Simmons, who was kind enough to answer my questions this month:
Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?
The Dennis R. Neill Equality Center in Tulsa, OK
The Nancy & Joe McDonald Rainbow Library was started by Nancy McDonald to provide a place for her daughter to be able to find LGBT resources after she “came out.” Since Nancy began her equal rights work, the library has grown from a place that houses a smattering of books to a collection of almost 4,000 volumes. In the past year, and especially the past few months, the library has gone from being a more passive resource on the second floor of the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center, to an active voice in creating and preserving access to 2SLGBTQIAA+ materials to the greater community.
Can you tell us more about how your library supports the community?
I love getting to bring books to different groups of people that would otherwise not know of the library’s existence. Or, if they did know, didn’t have easy access to it physically. I’ve connected with a local—and one of the few remaining—GSAs (Genders & Sexualities Alliances), and I bring an assortment of books for them to check out every couple of weeks. Another amazing event was the Banned Book service at All Souls Unitarian Church last year. A record number of people attended that service, and the library was set up right outside the entry doors. So every single person who attended that service had the opportunity to learn about the library.
That’s great exposure! Speaking of your library, what are some of your favorite items in your collection?
What’s a particular challenge your library experiences?
We are needing to remove all the labels on the books and relabel them. There have been a few cataloging systems put into place over the years, and we are wanting to standardize and modernize it, as well as make it look uniform and professional. Peeling labels off of 3,000 books takes a lot of time, and since we are 100% volunteer-run (including myself), it is taking a very long time. However, once we are done, it will be so much easier to label books for different locations as we open them up and keep track of what we have.
What’s your favorite thing about TinyCat?
100% the online capability for us. Before, people would have to come into the Center and go upstairs to find things in the library. Now they can search from their own devices. What would help us out a lot is the ability to modify genres and add our own. We are relying on tags and collections to sort books by age range, interest, and segment of the community; and honestly, it’s a little overwhelming.
That’s great feedback, thanks. You can already edit your own Genres on LibraryThing itself, and I’m hoping that we can soon bring individual Genres through TinyCat as well. If you want to add brand new Genres, please let us know what you’re looking for on Talk!
Want to learn more about the Nancy & Joe McDonald Rainbow Library?
Visit their website at http://okeq.org/ and explore their full TinyCat collection here.
To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.
We’ve scattered a shower of rainbows around the site, and it’s up to you to try and find them all.
Decipher the clues and visit the corresponding LibraryThing pages to find a rainbow. Each clue points to a specific page right here on LibraryThing. Remember, they are not necessarily work pages!
If there’s a rainbow on a page, you’ll see a banner at the top of the page.
You have just two weeks to find all the rainbows (until 11:59pm EDT, Friday June 30th).
Come brag about your shower of rainbows (and get hints) on Talk.
Win prizes:
Any member who finds at least two rainbows will be
awarded a rainbow badge. Badge ().
Members who find all 11 rainbows will be entered into a drawing for one of five LibraryThing (or TinyCat) coaster sets and stickers. We’ll announce winners at the end of the hunt.
P.S. Thanks to conceptDawg for the illustration, which is a riff on the European bee-eater.
ConceptDawg has made all of our treasure hunt graphics in the last couple of years. We like them, and hope you do, too!
Win free books from the June 2023 batch of Early Reviewer titles! We’ve got 179 books this month, and a grand total of 3,273 copies to give out. Which books are you hoping to snag this month? Come tell us on Talk.
The deadline to request a copy is Sunday, June 25th at 6PM EDT.
Eligibility: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Latvia, Poland and more. Make sure to check the message on each book to see if it can be sent to your country.
Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!
We’ve revamped CoverGuess, our collaborative cover-tagging game. We’ve made it faster and changed some rules. Very soon we’ll be releasing a cool new feature based on it. (Hint: You’ll be able to search for covers by what’s on them.) And we’re giving out prizes to LibraryThing members who play.
CoverGuess is a LibraryThing institution. Starting in 2010, we invited members to describe book covers, racking up points for matching other members. In 13 years members have added more than 3.2 million tags to book covers!
Now we’re launching a new and improved version of the game, to get it ready for a new search interface, with some new rules:
Eight tags. As searchers are likely to focus on the most significant elements, we’re asking members to focus on the eight most relevant tags. (You can add more, but you won’t receive points for them.)
Omit bare colors. And we’re asking members to avoid bare color tags, like “blue” or “red.” You are still encouraged to use colors when describing things on the cover, such “blue horse” or “yellow flower.” (We’re going to get covers’ predominant colors another way, so we don’t want you to have to waste your time labeling them.)
Multi-Word Bonus. Scoring has changed slightly. You now get a bonus for multi-word tags. For example, matching “green field” is worth 2x points, and matching “bird in cage” is worth 3x.
Contest
We’re running a month-long contest to celebrate the launch of the new CoverGuess! We’ll be keeping score from May 12th–June 12th, with prizes going to the top ten players, as well as ten other randomly selected participants.
The top player will receive an extra grand prize as well.
We’ve got a selection of stickers, coasters, tote bags, stamps, t-shirts and CueCats (more details to come) to give away, so come check it out here, and start tagging: https://www.librarything.com/coverguess