Anirvan, over at the Bookfinder Journal, stumbled over a book-translation database called Index Translationum* operated by—of all things—UNESCO.

The search engine is early-90s bad, but the results are decent. Here are all the translations it knows of my wife’s The Mermaids Singing:

Carey, Lisa: L’île aux sirènes [French] / Catherine Pageard / Paris: Presses de la Cité [France], 1999. 331 p. English: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: Havfruenes sang [English] / Elsa Frogner / Oslo: Egmont Hjemmets bokforl. [Norway], 1999. 253 s. Norwegian: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: L’île aux sirènes [French] / Catherine Pageard / Montréal: Libre expression [Canada], 1999. 331 p. English: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: Jeg kan høre havfruer synge [Danish] / Ulla Warrern / Kbh.: Lindhardt og Ringhof [Denmark], 1998. 242 p. English: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: Merineitsite laul [Estonian] / Uta Saar / Tallinn: Perioodika [Estonia], 2000. 284, 1 p. English: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: Das Lied der Insel : Roman [German] (Vollst. Taschenbuchausg.) / Gabriele Gockel; Petra Hrabak / München: Droemer Knaur [Germany], 2002. 347 S. English: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: Das Lied der Insel : Roman [German] (Vollst. Taschenbuchausg.) / Gabriele Gockel; Petra Hrabak / München: Droemer Knaur [Germany], 2001. 347 S. English: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: L’île aux sirènes [French] / Catherine Pageard / Paris: France loisirs [France], 2000. 294 p., couv. ill. en coul. English: The mermaids singings
Carey, Lisa: Merenneitojen laulu [Finnish] (ISBN: 951-0-22963-6) / Eva Siikarla / Porvoo, Helsinki, Juva: WSOY [Finland], 1998. 360 s. English: Mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: Merenneitojen laulu [Finnish] (ISBN: 951-643-934-9) / Eva Siikarla / Helsinki: Suuri suomalainen kirjakerho [Finland], 1998. 305, 1 s. English: Mermaids singing

There are some clear dups, and its missing the Dutch translation, Luister naar de zee (known to LibraryThing). Still, it’s pretty good.

The various FAQ pages on the site aren’t very helpful. Does anyone know where it comes from and who’s really making it? Is someone parsing MARC records from national libraries? Is it done by hand? The logo suggests CDs are involved. Can I buy them? I get a dump of the data?

*As a former classics scholar the name caught me. Was this the return of “international Latin”? (And if so, is the Foreign Service looking to hire?) Alas, the Index dates from 1932.

Be sure to check out J. K. Rowling’s Harvard Commencement speech:

http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

UPDATE: Check out this Morning Edition story on Harvard students unhappy with her selection. One can only hope they experience failure the failure recommended by Rowling.

Penn Libraries have put out a series of library movies: LibClips.* They are simultaneously terrifying and dangerously hysterical. The musical numbers take the cake, in my opinion.

You must go watch them now.

My favorites:
“Get it with BorrowDirect+” (he harmonizes with himself!)
“Find it a Click Away” (who hasn’t wished they were a floating head before? Man, can I relate)

Finally, I appreciate the captioning at the bottom. Makes karaoke easier.

But where is the aria for PennTags?

*hat-tip, my friend Adrienne

“The Algorithm” made two assumptions about me, one very flattering and one not.

First, Facebook believes that I may “know” author and internet hero Cory Doctorow.

Perhaps Mr. Doctorow actually knows some people I “know” on Facebook (but don’t actually know). That’s possible. Or maybe it’s just flattering me.

Meanwhile, Google’s GMail algorithm thinks I have toenail fungus.

I can usually figure out why Google is serving me up an ad. Read an email from Abebooks and it serves up flights to Victoria, Canada, where they have their headquarters.

But I don’t know what confluence of keywords suggested this. Was it my wife telling me about Liam’s swim class? We all know pool dressing rooms are fungal paradises. Anyway, it has me worried. Google has some powerful technology. Maybe I have do have toenail fungus!

Oh, and check out the end of the ad, “Written by a well known auther.” Ouch.

I never do it, so perhaps I can be forgiven for a short-form link roundup?

• We hit twenty-five million books. 
• Gizmodo reports on an law-review article on the legal status of books you “buy” for your Kindle or Sony Reader. This has been my problem with these devices—not the loss of paper, but the loss of ownership. I want to be able to sell my books and to pass them onto my children. I want a future with used bookstores, and one where Amazon does not store how many pages I’ve read and which, every page I’ve bookmarked and annotation I’ve added. Apparently the issue is more complicated than it might appear at first blush. If something looks like a sale, courts just might consider it one.
• The video of Clay Shirky’s Berkman Center talk about his upcoming Here Comes Everybody: The power of organizing without organizations is finally up. Clay has been inspiring me ever since his famous talk Ontology is Overrated. I didn’t make it to the Berkman talk, but Abby and Sonya were there, and very impressed.
• Library Journal reports that Ask.com is laying off some 40 employees, including its librarian, Gary Price. It looks like Ask is giving up its quixotic effort to become a serious search-engine contender. (I’m still rooting for Gigablast myself.) Back in May 2007, Price was interviewed by Daniel Chudnov for his Library Geeks podcast (what’s happened to that anyway?). Interesting show. Interesting guy.
• I completely missed this news, but it’s big. Apparently British ILS vendor/consortium Talis is contributing several million records to the Open Library project. Way to go, Talis. No word yet on whether OCLC will follow. 
• The quote of the week comes from venture capitalist Barry Schuler, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson: “If I see another business plan for a social network, I might blow my brains out.” I feel the same way about LibraryThing clones. If you’re considering one, write me an email and I’ll send you some other ideas for book-related companies. I’m contractually obligated not to do side-projects, and I have no money to invest so please, take my ideas. Don’t write the forty-first book social network! (hat-tip Steven)

Ah, the Onion.

Seriously. Check it out: http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/etc/game1/game1.swf

See Carnegie Mellon’s arcade.

It’s funny because it’s true.

Ultimately I think it’s all about one thing. The hype isn’t misplaced, but a lot more value is created than captured. Facebook touches more people than Ford does, and, I suspect brings them more joy. But Facebook can’t get at that value the way Ford does.

Google got at a tiny slice of the value they create with AdWords, and it’s making them insanely wealthy.

LibraryThing also makes lot of people insanely happy. While we capture some value—it helps that our engineers are few and pay for their own beer—we’re never going to capture most of the value we create.

Good, I think.

The OCLC report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World is out. It’s long and tedious, but skimable and with an interesting core.* Some highlights:

• Library directors are much more web savvy than the general public, yet much less likely to use social networking sites.
• Almost every category of website usage has gone up, except library catalogs, which went down.
• Few of any group think “it should be the library’s role to build social networking sites for your community.” The question seems flawed—as if libraries are really going to build social networking sites—but it’s still depressing.
• There’s a good half-disussion, including Sarah Houghton-Jan (Librarian in Black), Michael Sauers, Henry Bankhead (Los Gatos) and Meredith Farkas (Information wants to be free).

I suppose I’m (very) biased, but I’m puzzled how they managed to write 280 pages, with large sections on social networking, social networking in libraries and libraries’ future in social networking, without mentioning LibraryThing or any of its competitors.** (I’m not arguing bias, since they could easily have mentioned our competitors and not us!)

Color me crazy, but the rapid and—in tune of the report’s international focus—international spread of LibraryThing and other sites (more than 45 at last count) is a much more interesting and powerful demonstration of the potential of book-based social networking than the wan factoid “As of September 2007, MySpace reports 197 online groups with ‘book club’ in the title.”!

More on Stephen’s Lighthouse, Shifted Librarian, Lorcan Dempsey, YALSA, Resource Shelf.

In other news, OCLC released a new logo. Does anyone else see this and hear “glug glug glug”?

*One meta impression: I can’t get over all the photos of pretty, well-scrubbed, orthodontically-correct and racially-balanced un-people which, to large and impersonal organizations suggests a “human touch.” It makes me want to take a camera down to my local library and capture something authentic—someone tired, stressed-out, unshaven, pimply, pierced, maladjusted, unhealthy, decrepit or drunk.* It makes me want to hold up a sign that reads “I’m ugly. And I read.”
**There is one glancing mention by Nicolas Morin, but unlike all the other sites I found—ReadItSwapIt!—LT didn’t make the glossary.

We’re been hit very hard by blog spammers—hundreds of blog comments advertising Chinese gold farming, among other things. Clearing the comments is taking me hours. So, for now, I’m turning off anonymous comments on this blog and the main one, and requiring comment authentication. I’ll scale back in a few days.