Lindsey Nichols (LibraryThing: lindseynichols) just joined the LibraryThing team as our “assistant librarian”—bringing the total librarians on staff count up to two! She’s going to be helping us out part time from the “Boston office”,* helping with emails, answering questions, dealing with account issues, mailing out CueCats, and whatever else we decide to throw at her.

Lindsey in a nutshell: She got her library degree from Simmons, and also has an MFA in creative writing. Clearly, she should be contributing to Help in Haiku endeavor on the new WikiThing. Lindsey’s favorite authors include Shelley Jackson, George Saunders, Peter Matthiessen, and Carson McCullers. She enjoys baking, reading commodity histories, and viewing educational museum taxidermy. Also long walks on the beach.**

You can email Lindsey at lindseylibrarything.com

I also wanted to make sure that we thanked Clifford Vickrey (LibraryThing: dinner_bell), our excellent and tireless intern over the summer. Cliff was amazingly likeable*** guy, who refused to sit anywhere except on the floor, and was an excellent chauffeur in the pouring rain. Thanks to him. We’ve also decided to give his entire school (Colby) free LibraryThing accounts, so watch for news on that.****

*aka, Abby’s apartment
**ok, fine, I added that last part.
***so sayeth Tim
****We’re thinking of giving free accounts to students at a handful of schools (starting with our own alma maters, of course).

We’re going to make some database changes tonight, starting at 2am Eastern US and continuing for 1-3 hours.

I’ve added two features to the Cover view in Your Library. You can resize your covers with handy plus and minus buttons. And you can sort your books within Cover view (before this you had to do it in List view).

The back story is that I’m rewriting* Your Library rather extensively, both because it needed to be done and to prepare the way for collections (which are finally going to happen!). Your library needs a good scrub before collections arrive. The changes are minor on the surface, but drastic underneath. If you see problems, let us know.**

*What programmers call “refactoring” for no good reason.
**Since there’s been some speculation, we wil NOT be releasing collections today—although it’s our second birthday—or, probably, this week.

We just hired Casey Durfee (LibraryThing: caseydurfee), a crackerjack “Library 2.0” hacker. Casey’s first project—faster, better search—debuts today (see below). It’s a big win. We have a long queue of similar projects. Casey will also be heading up LibraryThing for Libraries, our project to get our data into library catalogs.

Casey will be working from Seattle, where he was recently left a job at the Seattle Public Library, managing their library system. Before that Casey worked at SirsiDynix*, so he has a lot of background in the arcane world of library systems—just what we needed for LibraryThing for Libraries. Casey is also responsible for L2, a handy Greasemonkey plug-in that adds Amazon content to library catalogs.

Perhaps the coolest thing Casey has done is a project called Helios, a “faceted” search on the Library of Congress records, done very simply and entirely with open-source software. It was a personal project, and although it’s not a complete solution, it searches the LC better than the LC’s million-dollar catalog. You can see Casey in action, talking about Helios, in this Code4Lib talk on Google Video.

Search. Check out the new work and author searches. They’re based on Solr, a simple but powerful search engine, and the same one Casey used on the LC data. Until now, we were relying on MySQLs fulltext capabilities. We had outgrown it, and slow performance was causing frequent database glitches.

It’s fast, accurate and searches all titles, not just the “leading” (mostly English) ones. But, as with everything we do, it’s not “perfect.” Casey has set up a Talk post about it. He has a variety of knobs he can turn, and is looking for feedback. I’m convinced it’s overzealous on “stemming”—picking up “loves” and “lovely” for “love.” That it even does stemming is quite an improvement from our previous solution. Once we’ve got it working the way we like, we’ll also be adding it to touchstones and elsewhere on the site.

Other projects. Casey is a certified library programmer. (I just play one on TV.) He knows his MARC21 from his UNIMARC, and his “glyphs from his diacritics”.** As time goes by we hope he can work on things like:

• Rewriting our library-data import, to get all the diacriticals right and squeeze more out of the MARC records.
• Adding more libraries. We’ve been avoiding UNIMARC libraries (eg., Italy libraries) and, until recently, most SRU/SRW-based ones. We can do better. We have also finagled access to British Library data, so look for us to add that too.
  

LibraryThing for Libraries. Right now, we have more than 350 libraries asking us about LibraryThing for Libraries. Altay and I have been going through at a snail’s pace. Casey should be able to crank that up a bit. We also think his SirsiDynix experience will come in handy. He’s already written a handy LTFL export script for HIP. He’s well-known in the HIP ILS community, and should move us past our current success among Innovative Interfaces catalogs.

That’s it. Welcome on board, Casey!

*When it was Dynix.
**Whatever that means; suggested by Casey.

For about three hours this afternoon some of our blog widgets went crazy, inserting very large covers where small ones were supposed to be. I was fixing a long-standing problem, in which some books never showed up in the widget.* In the course of fixing that problem I created another. Some users were amused, some dumbfounded and some pissed off. All good reations, I think.

Anyway, a few users emailed us, and Christopher stepped in to fix the problem. The widgets are okay now.

To the bloggers affected, my sincere apologies. I should have checked the code more before it went live. The change I made didn’t affect widgets of the type I have on the blog or one of the users with the problem I was fixing, so I missed it. It was a dumb mistake, and I wish I had caught it in ten minutes, not three hours.

By way of making it up, if you had one of these blogs and felt inconvenienced, please write me a note with your blog URL and your address, and I’ll ship you off a CueCat barode scanner. Please take me up on this. It’s the least we an do.

*Basically, LibraryThing had imperfect knowledge of what covers Amazon had available, so we weren’t showing everything we could.