Following up on last night’s feature, jjwilson61 recommended turning it around. So I’ve added a stats/memes page to show the groups your connections—friends, and other people—are in.
Here’s your page.
Come talk about it.
Following up on last night’s feature, jjwilson61 recommended turning it around. So I’ve added a stats/memes page to show the groups your connections—friends, and other people—are in.
Here’s your page.
Come talk about it.
Labels: new features
Two small changes: Group pages now show who among your friends and other connections are in the group. We’ve also restored group member-counts. Both look forward to a restored group-Zeitgeist.
Discuss here.
Labels: 1
A warm welcome to Julian North Catalfo, born 11:12pm on June 28—8 lbs. 5 oz., 20 inches. (We just got the first picture, to blog it.)
Julian was born to LibraryThing library developer Chris Catalfo (CCatalfo) and his wife Joanna. Older sister Ellie is adjusting well.
Julian caps LibraryThing’s odds-defying “Season of Babies“—five babies in five months! There is clearly something in the water here.
Labels: LibraryThing babies
The July 2010 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 75 books this month, and a grand total of 1938 copies to give out.
Books to get excited about include (but are not limited to):
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 Friday, July 23rd at 6PM EST.
Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to many, many countries. 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!
Canongate Books | Henry Holt and Company | W.W. Norton |
B&H Publishing Group | Ballantine Books | Sovereign |
Doubleday Books | William Morrow | Ulysses Press |
Seven Stories Press | St. Martin’s Press | Picador |
St. Martin’s Minotaur | Penguin Young Readers Group | Hachette Book Group |
The Permanent Press | Cemetery Dance | Del Rey |
Tundra Books | Orca Book Publishers | Bloomsbury |
Springer | BookViewCafe | Gefen Publishing House |
Little, Brown and Company | Hunter House | DiaMedica |
St. Martin’s Griffin | Harper Paperbacks | Avon Books |
Bromera | Putnam Books | Thomas Dunne Books |
Bethany House | Chosen Books | Berkley |
Zed Books |
Labels: early reviewers
The June 2010 Bonus batch of Early Reviewer book is up! We’re giving away 15 copies of Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn, by Dr. Larry Rosen. Check out Larry Rosen’s website and blog, Rewired: The Psychology of Technology, on Psychology Today.
I’ll be interviewing Dr. Rosen at the end of the month, about how available technology (iPods, video games, computers, cell phones) are affecting how we absorb information. Dr. Rosen’s book is primarily about how children’s brains are rewired by access to these technologies, how the way we’ve taught is not taking these rewired brains into account and what we can do about it.
I’m taking questions from LibraryThing members. If you’d like to ask Dr. Rosen a question, please post it here. If you’d like to purchase the book, you can get it on sale, through our friends at Book Depository for US$11.49 (and free shipping!)
To request this book, 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:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list
The deadline to request a copy is Friday, July 2 at 12PM EST.
Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country, and this particular giveaway is only available to US and CA folks.
Thanks to Palgrave Macmillan!
Labels: bonus batch, early reviewers
We have added a new source to every member’s Add Books page: OverCat, LibraryThing’s new index of 32 million library records, assembled from libraries around the world, and the first step in a major upgrade of LibraryThing’s cataloging functions.
Sources. OverCat was assembled from over 700 sources. The core consists of full datasets from the Library of Congress, Washington State, Boston College, Oregon State, and Talis Base (a collection of UK libraries).* To this we’ve added records from the hundreds of thousands of books members have searched for and added from the 690 libraries LibraryThing connects to.
The end result is arguably the second-largest searchable database of library records in existence, after OCLC.**
How to use it. To use OverCat, go to your Add books page. OverCat has been added to everyone’s source list. (It can be removed but not yet reordered.)
High-quality results. To make it easier to find the edition you need, OverCat combines results into edition-level clusters, so you get one result per edition (rather than pages and pages of the same edition of the same book from different libraries). By default, it will give you what it guesses the best available record is for that edition, but you can select from any one of the alternate records if you want to.
OverCat isn’t everything. The Library of Congress data dump is not current–although it’s been supplemented with user searches. Our relevancy ranking isn’t as good as Amazon’s. (We could use your feedback to make it better.) But most users will find it a useful source, and many will find it the best one.
The Big Issue. OverCat is available to LibraryThing members in the course of normal site activity—cataloging small collections of books.*** It will not be available for external access, including by libraries. It is not a back door to OCLC data.
This will come as a disappointment to many, including us. We have long argued for library-data openness and against OCLC’s bid to privatize and monopolize library data. But we also made it clear to the libraries we search that their data will not be made available outside of the context of personal cataloging without their permission. This will not change, now or in the future.
We would love to open OverCat up, to make it OpenLibrary as we originally hoped it would be it, or like Amazon Web Services, but with free, high quality data. We believe data openness is critical to the survival of libraries in our increasingly free and open world. But we depend upon open search portals, and will never open up a library’s data against its wishes. Some of these libraries may want to open up their data, but some clearly do not, and almost everyone is afraid of OCLC and its new data policy.*** Either way, we will abide by libraries’ wishes.
For the 690 libraries we search little has changed. We will still send member searches to your systems, but fewer—reducing your load—and the requests may not come at the time of searching. As before, found records will be stored on LibraryThing systems, but can now be used by more than one user and will appear in OverCat searches. Bulk or non-personal access will not be possible.
Thanks. OverCat has been a long-term project of Casey Durfee. The Board for Extreme Thing Advances helped us nail down bugs and decide on the name.
The future. LibraryThing’s greatest strength is its cataloging, but we don’t want to rest on that. There are a lot of improvements we can do now that we have a flexible, scaleable structure and repository for our data. OverCat is the first step here.
Come talk about your suggestions, and OverCat generally, on Talk here.
*Some OpenLibrary data was omitted for being mostly duplicative or of insufficient quality.
**For background on the OCLC issue, see here. We will also honor requests to remove libraries’ data from OverCat, excepting those libraries (like the LC), whose records are public by both law and public dumps.
There are larger collections. Harvard, for example, is said to have contributed 81 million records to OCLC, but most can’t have been book records, as the volume-count of Harvard is less than that of the Library of Congress, which we include.
We could make part of the data free, and part closed. But since the free data comes from OpenLibrary it would be duplicative of their efforts. We may explore this avenue in the future, as our primary complaint against OpenLibrary is the lack of exportable library-data formats.
***Exports of your library are included, obviously, but no larger dumps. “Personal” includes some small institutions, like church libraries, clubs and so forth.
Labels: cataloging, new features
The June 2010 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 62 books this month, and a grand total of 1350 copies to give out.
First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, please please 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
Some highlights: The new Mary Roach, Packing for Mars. Ridley Pearson’s In Harm’s Way. Tom Standage’s new An Edible History of Humanity. And we’re especially excited by Clay Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus!
The deadline to request a copy is Friday, June 25th at 6PM EST.
Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the many different countries. 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!
Henry Holt and Company | Bond Street Books | Canongate Books |
Tundra Books | The Permanent Press | Doubleday Books |
W.W. Norton | Ballantine Books | Small Beer Press |
Zest Books | Speir Publishing | Bloomsbury |
Bell Bridge Books | Eerdmans Books for Young Readers | Dutton |
Hesperus Press | Chalice Press | DAW Books |
Putnam Books | Beacon Press | Santa Fe Writer’s Project |
St. Martin’s Griffin | Orca Book Publishers | Doubleday Canada |
House of Anansi Press | PublicAffairs | Menasha Ridge Press |
Clerisy Press | The Penguin Press | William Morrow |
The History Press |
Labels: early reviewers
We’ve added integration with a thirteenth swap site, Swaptree.com. By available titles Swaptree is now one of the larger swap sites we integrate with—and the last large one I’m aware of!
Swaptree differs from some of the other sites in that you don’t accumulate points and trade them in. Instead, Swaptree helps you make item-for-item trades with other users. The site also lists DVDs, CDs and video games, and you can make cross-media trades (eg., a video game for a book).
I’m don’t know how it figures out what you get for everything, but it’s a nifty idea, and seems sensible in light of my blog post on top wanted and unwanted items at swap sites. When I entered the top-wanted The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it offered me choice of nearly 100,000 books—some quite attractive to me—along with some appealing DVDs and games. At the other end, it offered me nothing at all for the least-wanted Da Vinci Code. That certainly seems like a potential answer to one problem with swap sites.
You can specify which swap sites are calculated into on Edit profile > Sites/apps.
It might be interesting if, in the future, LibraryThing integrated more deeply, so that, when you went to a book on LibraryThing, it told you if you could get it based on your Swaptree “have” list.
Come talk about this.
Labels: new features, swap, swap site
We’ve just introduced “phase one” of LibraryThing-Facebook integration. It’s been a ridiculously long time coming, but it’s here. The framework for the project is built and one feature has been implemented—review posting.
Posting Reviews. Phase one is posting reviews. Whenever you write or edit a review you can elect to post the review to Facebook, where it appears as on the right. It also links back to the review page on LibraryThing.
On your Edit profile: Sites/apps page you will find a handy checkbox to make the “Share to Facebook” default to “on” (unless you’ve already published the review, in which case you must explicitly make it republish it).
Sharing via Facebook adds the LibraryThing Books app., which is a Facebook app. for LibraryThing. Right now it does nothing except post your reviews as requested.
So, what else should it do? (Everything, okay, but what is most important?) Come talk about it here.
Credits. The programming this time around was done by Mike (LTMike). Members of the Board for Extreme Thing Advances provided valuable help.
Labels: facebook, new features
Welcome to Octavia, the newest LibraryThing baby! Congratulations to Sonya and her husband Jason on the birth of their daughter last night at a healthy 8 pounds and 20.5 inches long. All three are happy and well.
Not to be outdone by Mike and Lulu last month, Sonya live-blogged during labor. (Having had a baby myself once upon a time, I just have to say WOW/WHAT?! in amazement that she had the mental wherewithal to blog).
Post your congrats on this Talk thread.
Want more cuteness? See all the LibraryThing baby announcements here (and we’ve still got one more baby coming soon)!
UPDATE (7/30/10): The original post was lost and we were unable to save the original comments. Our apologies, but please feel free to post new comments.
Labels: LibraryThing babies
The May 2010 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 70 books this month, and a grand total of 1234 copies to give out. (I swear, I didn’t make that number up.)
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 Friday, May 28th at 6PM EST.
Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the many different countries. 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!
Henry Holt and Company | Grand Central Publishing | Canongate Books |
Tundra Books | Putnam Books | Orbit Books |
New American Library | St. Martin’s Press | Riverhead Books |
Rovira i Virgili University Press | Penguin | St. Martin’s Minotaur |
Ballantine Books | Bantam Dell | The Permanent Press |
University of Iowa Press | Gefen Publishing House | St. Martin’s Griffin |
Jove Books | Picador | Tor Books |
Faber and Faber | Other Press | Doubleday Books |
Demos Medical Publishing | Unbridled Books | IDW Publishing |
Hesperus Press | Gibbs Smith Publisher | Shambhala |
Harper | Menasha Ridge Press | Clerisy Press |
Orca Book Publishers |
Labels: early reviewers
Surprise! We just sent out the April Early Reviewers winners. But we have the opportunity to give out a few more books quickly. So here it is: A tiny bonus batch, closing on Tuesday.
The War Memoir of (HRH) Wallis, Dutchess of Windsor by Kate Auspitz
“Was it the greatest love story of the twentieth century or a bloodless coup?
She was the first person to be named Woman of the Year by Time magazine. Yet Wallis Simpson is one of the most reviled women in history. The social climbing divorcée was portrayed as a snob and a voluptuary who came close to destroying the British monarchy. But could she have been the pawn of Allied statesmen determined to remove a Nazi sympathizer from power?”
The book comes to us from Viking Canada.
From a world in which Avatar is Fight Club instead of Disney’s Pocahontas, James Tiptree, Jr. wrote The Dice Man, and magic doesn’t work any better than it does here…
…we bring you The Gnoll Credo. Sell that ‘enchanted’ sword and come join the hyena-people. Don’t wear your good clothes.
The book comes to us from 100 Watt Press, and also appeared in our March batch, when it was requested 820 times.
How to participate. 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
Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US and Canada.
Labels: early reviewers
I’ve just sent out the April State of the Thing, our monthly newsletter. Sign up to get it, or you can read it online.
This month’s State of the Thing introduces some of the new LibraryThing babies, gives book recommendations from Robyn Okrant and David Lipsky (featuring all the David Foster Wallace you could want), and beings an exclusive author interview with Anne Lamott:
Anne Lamott’s Imperfect Birds is the third in a series about the characters Elizabeth and Rosie (and now-husband James). In Imperfect Birds, the first-person narrative shifts between mother and teen daughter. Elizabeth is simultaneously dealing with her own demons of depression and alcoholism while dealing with her child’s growing freedom. Rosie pushes boundaries to the breaking point, with serious drug use and lying forcing Elizabeth to view the unpleasant realities of her daughter’s actions and her own desire for polite fiction over impolite truth. Anne’s previous books also include the non-fiction Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year and Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.
Next month, I’ll be interviewing Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, about his new book Beatrice and Virgil. I’ll also be interviewing David Baldacci, who’s new novel, Deliver Us from Evil, will be out April 20th.
Have a question for Martel or Baldacci? Post them in the Author Interviews—you ask the questions group.
(Photo is of me reading in a cherry tree, taken by me.)
Labels: state of the thing
Many congrats go to LibraryThing developer Mike and his wife Rebecca, on the birth of their daughter, the already impressive Lulu!
Mike liveblogged the event, so you can check out even more cute photos.
If you’d like to send happy thoughts, well wishes or scones, there’s a thread here.
Lulu is the third LibraryThing baby born in the past month (Max and William joined the LibraryThing team at the end of March), and we still have two to go (myself, and Chris Catalfo) before July.
If you’d like to see all of the LibraryThing newborns, check out the rest of the LibraryThingBaby birth announcements.
Labels: LibraryThing babies
The April 2010 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 93 books this month, and a grand total of 2,098 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 Friday, April 23rd at 6PM EST.
NOTE: Two of the ebooks this month are available to read online-only, so make sure before you request that you are willing to read the book on your computer, online (as opposed to downloaded, on your computer/ereader/phone/etc.), because you’re responsible for reviewing any book you win.
Eligiblity: Publishers offer books country-by-country. Make sure to check the flags by each title to see if it can be sent to your country.
Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!
Kregel Publications | Penguin | Putnam Books |
Grand Central Publishing | Henry Holt and Company | Ballantine Books |
Canongate Books | Bell Bridge Books | Tundra Books |
WaterBrook Press | The Permanent Press | Del Rey |
Doubleday Books | Demos Medical Publishing | Frog Legs Ink |
PublicAffairs | Hol Art Books | PublishingWorks, Inc. |
Hesperus Press | Faber and Faber | W.W. Norton |
Hyperion Books | Picador | Seven Stories Press |
HarperCollins | Harper Paperbacks | Avon Books |
North Atlantic Books | Pomegranate | Wild Wolf Publishing |
St. Martin’s Griffin | Zed Books | Chalice Press |
Bantam Dell | Candlewick | MIRA |
Chin Music Press | Harlequin Teen |
Labels: early reviewers
Congratulations to John, LibraryThing’s systems administrator, and his wife Lou on their new twins, Max and William!
More photos here.
That both were boys is a surprise—the doctors had believed only one was a boy. (William was going to be Willow.) Together with Baz (5) and Ollie (3), John and Lou now have a four-boy family, and more opportunities for John to perfect his Spiderman cake!
There’s a best-wishes thread going here.
John’s twins are the first of four LibraryThing births coming up in the months ahead—Mike, Sonya and Chris Catalfo are next! They will join three, now five, other LibraryThing babies. There is clearly something in the water.
Labels: LibraryThing babies
I’ve just sent out State of the Thing, our monthly newsletter. Sign up to get it, or you can read a copy online.
This month’s State of the Thing features a round-up of new features, book recommendations from Dexter Palmer and Susan Wilson, and two exclusive author interviews:
Jonathan Maberry is the author of the techno-thriller Patient Zero. His new book, The Dragon Factory, is the sequel. Jonathan is a multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author, magazine feature writer, playwright, content creator, writing teacher/lecturer and LibraryThing author.
Seth Grahame-Smith broke onto the classics scene with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Now he’s taking on the biography genre with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. As we all know, Lincoln rises to political power to become one of the most famous presidents of all time for his fight against the injustice of slavery (and vampirism).
Next month our interviews are with Anne Lamott and Alan Bradley.
Labels: state of the thing
The March 2010 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 82 books this month, and a grand total of 2,477 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
Update: You can now opt to win more than one book per batch. Read the details, and how to opt in.
The deadline to request a copy is Friday, March 26th at 6PM EST.
Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to too many countries to list. Make sure to check each book to see if you’re eligible.
Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!
B&H Publishing Group | North Atlantic Books | Hunter House |
Ballantine Books | W.W. Norton | Doubleday Canada |
St. Martin’s Griffin | Tundra Books | Kregel Publications |
Penguin | Bell Bridge Books | Putnam Books |
Riverhead Books | Human Kinetics | BelleBooks |
Bantam Dell | Cemetery Dance | John Wiley & Sons |
Random House | Henry Holt and Company | Taylor Trade Publishing |
Seven Stories Press | New Village Press | South Dakota State Historical Society Press |
Gefen Publishing House | Dalkey Archive Press | QWERTY Publishers |
HighBridge | McBooks Press | Rovira i Virgili University Press |
McClelland & Stewart | Orca Book Publishers | Candlewick |
Picador | The Permanent Press | HarperCollins |
Doubleday Books | HarperStudio | Gotham Books |
Quirk Books | Avon Books | Harper |
Crossway | MIRA | HQN |
100 Watt Press | LUNA | WaterBrook Press |
Labels: early reviewers, LTER
After the success of cataloging the 1963 White House Library, we’ve made it into a monthly thing.
This month, starting at 12:00 EST Wednesday, March 2, and continuing for 24 hours, we’re going to be cataloging the on-board library of the U.S.S. California, as it was in 1905.
This California‘s library catalog were written up and published by the Government Printing Office, and has been scanned by the Internet Archive. Designed to serve the California’s 830-odd officers and men—the libraries were separate—it offers a unique view of the navy of the time, and of the country. The ship, then rechristened the San Diego, its library, and six sailors, went to the bottom of the ocean in 1918, the victim of a German U-boat.
The “Legacy Mob” is an amalgam—a mashup?—of two LibraryThing inventions:
Labels: Uncategorized
I just released an amusing diversion called CoverGuess.
Check it out here, and talk about it here.
What is CoverGuess?
CoverGuess is a sort of game. We give you covers, and you describe them in words. If you guess the same things as other players, you get points.
Why are you doing this?
The goal is to have fun, but also to build up a database of cover descriptions, to answer questions like “Do you have that book with bride on the bicycle?”
What’s the best way to do it?
Think about it how you’d describe the cover to someone—pick out the most significant elements. Does it have a car or a pair of shoes? Color terms are good, and so are terms like “blurry” or “sepia.” Above all, pick terms other players will be using.
How do points work?
You get one point for every matched term, for each other member who had it. So, if you say “car” and “dog” and two other members said “car” and one said “dog,” you get three points. Obviously, it’s better if you’re not the first member to tag the image, but the system randomizes that aspect. When you’re the first to tag an item, you get 0.25 points for your effort.
Aren’t you trying to use members’ free labor to make money?
Yes and no. All the data here is released under a Creative-Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and will be available in feed form. That means any non-profit entity, like a library, can use it without charge. We also commit to license it on the same terms to any bookstore with less than $10 million in sales. That leaves huge companies. If any want it, we’ll charge them!
Anything else?
It was partially inspired by Google’s ImageLabeler. Our anti-spam engine does something similar too.
The whole thing was perhaps summed up best in a tweet to me:
Labels: book covers, new feature, new features
I’ve pushed through a beta version of a new recommendation engine.
The “Read Alikes” recommendations supplement our existing automatic and member recommendations. “Read Alikes” are based directly on the members who have your books—the people who “read alike” you, or whatever.
So far, opinion is divided. Some members love it, and are getting great recommendations. Others report a parade of things they already know about. Is it quite consciously, however, a beta feature. It may be improved, or it may go away. Most likely, it will go away and be replaced by a better overall algorithm, with better tools for managing your recommendations.
Labels: new features, recommendations
On Tuesday I sent out February’s State of the Thing, our monthly newsletter. Sign up to get it, or you can read a copy online.
This month’s State of the Thing features a synopsis of site upgrades, and two exclusive author interviews:
Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel, The Historian was a hugely popular historical mystery. Switching gears from Dracula, it’s an art mystery that drives Kostova’s second novel The Swan Thieves, which is poised to follow in The Historian’s bestselling path.
Holly Black is well-known for The Spiderwick Chronicles and the Modern Tales of Faerie series. The Poison Eaters is Holly’s first short story collection. Filled with gritty scenes of magic enhantment and disenchantment, The Poison Eaters features previously published stories as well as new ones.
Next month our interviews will skew to the undead end of the spectrum, with Seth Grahame-Smith and Jonathan Maberry. Have a question for them? Post it here and we might use it in the upcoming interview.
Labels: state of the thing
If you enjoy reviewing books, and like getting free books in the mail, then this is the month to request an Early Reviewer title. There are 3,495 copies of 107 different books, all of which are either not published yet, or just recently published.
In previous months we had half this many copies available, which means this month twice as many members will win a book!
Points to note:
Sign up for Early Reviewers here. The February batch closes this Friday, February 26th at 6pm EST.
Labels: early reviewers, LTER
Overnight, some twenty LibraryThing members(1) entered, or “flash mob cataloged” an entire, historic library—the White House Library of the early 1960s and, largely, today. We did it from a limited-edition “Short-Title List” printed by the White House Historical Society, using LibraryThing’s 700-odd library data sources.(2)
The library, WHLibrary1963, contains some 1,700 books. It joins some 128 other “Legacy Libraries” cataloged or being cataloged by members. It’s our second Kennedy-themed library, after the incomplete JohnFKennedy—or third, if you count Marilyn Monroe‘s (interesting) collection.
Why We Did It. An amusing train-wreck of blog outrage moved us to action. Rob Port, a conservative radio host and blogger took a White House tour and spotted some books on the wall that made him jump. Hearing or mis-hearing that the books had been picked by Michelle Obama, Port blogged Photo Evidence: Michelle Obama Keeps Socialist Books In The White House Library.
Port’s picture included books like:
And a number of other, not-so-socialist titles, like U.S. Senators and Their World, all from the 40s, 50s and 60s. (Needless to say it didn’t apparently dawn on Port to look the books up, or wonder why they all seemed a tad old.)
The White House Library.The Washington Post‘s Short Stack blog knocked down the story. Far from being picked by Michelle Obama, the library was in fact assembled at the request of another First Lady—Jacqueline Kennedy.
Kennedy, who also oversay the redecoration of the room itself, delegated the selection to Yale librarian James T. Babb, who convened a small committee, including the editors of the Jefferson and Adams papers and the Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The work took about a year.
The book list was published in the New York Times in August 1963. A limited edition Short Title-List was printed in 1967. Between 1963 and 1967 a number of books were added to the list. From some Flickr pictures, it looks like a few more books may have been added—perhaps in the Johnson administration?—to the actual library.
What does it mean? While not a window into Obama’s book tastes, still less his socialism, the library is a window into something. Browsing through it, I can’t help feeling a sense of the time, and of the opinions and culture of the men who assembled it, and were intended to use it.
As I see it, Kennedy’s administration was marked by a rare embrace of intellect, ideas and even scholarship, but was also constrained somewhat by the mental world of contemporary east-coast elites—the “Harvards” that irritated Johnson so much. Although flattened by politic initial choices—it includes no living authors of fiction, and few works by non-US citizens— the 1963 White House Library was, in a sense, the library of the “Best and Brightest,” and it reflects their world view. As fun as it was to do, it’s perhaps a shame we don’t have similar collections for all the presidents since then. However interesting, it would be a shame if the White House Library forever remained a 1960s relic.
Come talk about the library here.
Continuing cataloging and cleanup progress here.
1. amba, ansate, bell7, bokai, carport, cbl_tn, ccc3579, clamairy, cpirmann, jbd1, jjlong, merry10, moibibliomaniac, momerath, SilentInAWay, spookykitten, theophila, timspalding, thornton37814, UtopianPessimist.
2. I kicked it off by driving from Portland down to the University of New Hampshire, which had the closest copy of the limited-edition Short-Title List. I love that my job periodically allows me to get in a car for the sole purpose of getting a book at some far-away library.
Labels: legacy libraries
There’s a minor tempest-in-a-teapot brewing over the White House library. Apparently a conservative blogger on a tour took a snapshot of some socialist-oriented books, misheard that Mrs. Obama had selected them, and blogged about it. They turned out to have been selected by Jackie Kennedy, or rather by a prominent Yale librarian she selected, and to have been there since the early 1960s.
I’m driving to the nearest copy of the library’s list (published as a limited edition book), and we’re going to use it as the basis for a Legacy Library. This is minor hot news, so I think we should try to do it fast. Any many hands make light work. Let’s see what an insane pack of bibliophilic historians can do.
We’re going to virtually flash-mob the library, by adding books from the list to a LibraryThing account at the same time.
Once I have pages, I’ll start posting them, and anyone who wants to help, can help! Read more about the project and join us.
Labels: flash mob, flash-mob cataloging, legacy libraries
Borrowing a joke from Brightcopy, I’ve turned some dead-horses into ponies, bringing some long-requested features to life, and even improving on them.
Books You Share Preferences. Some members have long campaigned for sorting the profile-page “Books You Share” box by author, not title. But I held off—that’s not the right choice for everyone. Instead I’ve added a preference for it, with a number of different sorting options.
Critically, I set the default to sorting by popularity from low to high, something nobody had ever requested. I thought members might pounce on me for it, but quite a few have said it was an unexpectedly good choice. It brings out the unusual books you share. And those are often the most interesting.
I also added a preference to change how many shared books are displayed.
See this topic for more about the feature.
Tag Combination. After a 16-month hiatus, new tag combinations and separations are back!
The idea is simple. LibraryThing allows members to combine tags that are highly similar in meaning and application. Classic examples are tags like “World War II” and “wwii” or “ww2.” We discourage combining terms that don’t entirely overlap, either in meaning or in usage. (If you’re interested in the ideas behind tagging, check out my What’s the Big Deal About Tagging? talk on YouTube.)
Tag combination only affects “global pages”; user tags are never changed.
So far as I know, we’re the only website to experiment with this idea, something noted in Gene Smith’s Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web. Tag-combination combines a new idea—tagging—with an older idea—what librarians call “authority control.”
This time, however, we’ve given it a twist—democratic authority control. Any member can propose a combination or separation, but the matter is put up to a vote—with a supermajority needed for any action. We hope it will slow down the process and make it more deliberate.
It’ll also save our servers from having to recalculate tags. With more than 60 million tags, and “science fiction” now at three million uses, instant, any-user combinations were really putting a strain on our system.
See more about it, and some examples here.
Labels: new features, tagging
I’ve added a simple feature to “favorite” message. You can also mark a last-read, for those times when Thingamabrarian eloquence prevents a topic from being read in a single sitting.
More here.
Labels: new features