LibraryThing for Libraries

FAQs: Technical

Troubleshooting

At any time, you can email questions to abby@librarything.com. It's great when you figure it out on your own, but don't get frustrated, we're here to help.

Troubleshooting section

My account

How can I change the LTFL administrator password?

You can change it here. Log into LibraryThing with the LTFL administrator user first, if necessary.

Catalog Enhancements

Can I change the titles of "Similar books" or any of the enhancements?

Yes! You can edit the words you see in the catalog (that describe the enhancement) by logging into your account, choosing the 'Configure' tab, and opening each enhancement's custom code. In the "HTML if success" box, change <div class="LT_label">Similar books:</div><div class="LT_widget_container">[[WIDGET]]</div> to your preferred term, for example <div class="LT_label">Recommended reads</div><div class="LT_widget_container">[[WIDGET]]</div>

Why do I sometimes see weird tags?

The tags here come from LibraryThing.com. LibraryThing members have applied over 57 million tags to their books. Because people are different, and can make anything they want a tag, you will occasionally run across a tag that's irrelevant, wrong, or just plain strange.

Why do books show up under the same tag, but they're not similar titles on LibraryThing?

Our similar books algorithm draws on five separate algorithms—similar tags are only one of these. The others are mostly based on overlap between personal collections—people who have X also have Y.

Why aren't I seeing recommendations? I looked it up and it has recommendations in LibraryThing.

The short answer is that it's usually because there aren't any similar titles on LibraryThing.com.

Often, we we have don't have many copies of the item in LibraryThing, it greatly affect recommendations. Generally, if a book is owned by less than 15 people, chances are greater that there won't be recommendations available for it.

In your LTFL account, under Configuration, you can change the option called Drop risky recommendations? This will pull up more recommendations for books with few copies in LibraryThing.The downside? A murder mystery may have the recommendation of an algebra textbook.

The long answer is if there aren't at least 15 or 20 copies of a book on LibraryThing, you're almost certain not to get any recommendations in LTFL even if you see some on LibraryThing, unless your configuration is set to 'Show All Recommendations'.

There would need to be at least 40 or 50 copies of a book on LibraryThing to get recommendations in LTFL if you're at the most conservative setting.

If you run into a book in your catalog that has similar titles in LibraryThing, but not in your catalog, you can email us with the title, and we can run the algorithms to manually check for recommendations.

Reviews Enhancement

How do I moderate reviews?

Make sure you're signed in:

Once you're signed in, you'll look at the top of the page for the Moderation tab. That's where you'll see the pages that need to be moderated. There are two buttons - accept or reject. Once a review is accepted, it will show up in your OPAC. If you reject it, the patron will continue to see the review when they're logged in, but no one else will see it. On the moderation page you can also see previously accepted and denied reviews and change them if you'd like. In the right-hand sidebar, you'll see links to navigate the unmoderated, moderated and rejected reviews.

How do I add more moderators?

To add moderators, the main account holder will need to log into LTFL and go to the the Reviews section of the Configure page, and click the "Create/manage moderator accounts" link.

If the person already has a LibraryThing account (for the main site), they can associate that account to moderate reviews. (It will not affect their LibraryThing account.) Otherwise, you can create them an account. (What this is doing is creating a LibraryThing account.)

On the Configure page, you can add more people to be alerted when there are reviews to moderate, by adding them in the "Email when moderation needed" text box, with commas between: 

   catwhiz@ourlibrary.com, crankyITguy@ourlibrary.com

How do I delete a review?

In the moderation panel, you'll see the title of the item, the username (and email, if the patron has signed up with an email) and the content of their review. There are two options for you—accept or reject.

What if I accidentally accepted or rejected a review and I'd like to change it?

If you mistakenly accept or reject a review you'd like to change, you can. To the right of the moderation panel page, there's a set of links:

My Library
Unmoderated (2)
Moderated (61)
Rejected (7)
All reviews (70)

You can click each link to see the reviews that have been accepted or rejected. You can make them unmoderated again, or put them in the opposite category (rejected if it's accepted, or accepted if it's denied).

What if someone from another library adds a review to my library?

Because they're using your catalog, it's yours to moderate (if you moderate). The other library's name will show up in red.

Can someone who's not a patron at our library sign up to review?

Yes. They'll have to go to your OPAC every time to sign in and review items.

If my library doesn't buy the LTFL Reviews Enhancement, can I still sign up to review at another library?

Don't sign up for an account under another library unless you'd like that username to be associated with that library forever.

Exporting and Uploading

Why do I need to send LibraryThing my library's data?

LibraryThing for Libraries does not integrate with your ILS on the back end. Basically, we need to know what you have so that we don't recommend books you don't have.

What format should I send?

You can send us data in two formats:

  1. A tab-delimited file containing ISBN, title and author.
  2. MARC21 or UNIMARC records.

MARC is a better option, if you can do it. Future features may depend on data besides ISBN, title and author.

How much data should I send?

Send it all, or at least a very large piece with "coherence to it," like all your fiction, or all your history. LTFL works through "associations" between books, between tags, etc. With a small data set the "software" would work, but the data wouldn't. It would be blank, or it might give the 30th-best reading suggestion.

Anything else about format?

If a record doesn't have a valid ISBN, we will ignore it. You do not need to remove records without ISBNs. Both ISBN10s and ISBN13s are fine.

You can send one file or many.

Where do I send the data?

You upload the data to us via the "Upload ISBN" page at your account.

What else do you need?

To get book links working we need your OPAC's ISBN-parameterized URL, that is the URL-template for finding a particular ISBN. To our knowledge, all OPACs have such a thing. If you don't know yours, we can probably figure it out, given the vendor and version number of your OPAC.

Can we send MARC records?

Yes.

What about updating our data?

At present you can update your ISBN data in two ways:

  1. Upload whole new file
  2. Upload incremental additions

We are not currently providing a feature to upload a "deaccession list" or to edit your ISBN list manually after uploading. If one or both prove useful, we can implement this.

What if our records have more than one ISBN?

Our code uses the first ISBN it recognizes. The LTFL data comes from the LibraryThing work page, so the paperback and hardback editions will have the same info.

The LibraryThing work page is the page that encompasses all editions. See an example [ http://www.librarything.com/work/11883 here].

Configuration

(You'll want to email us to set up an account, so you can upload your data. Email abby@librarything.com to request an account.)

What sort of configurations does LTFL allow?

The enhancements are highly configurable. You can control settings like how many books are displayed in "similar books," the form of the links and what to display if a book has no enhancements. You can also change the CSS for every enhancement, and for every element in every enhancement.

What if we use a firewall, proxy server, Deep Freeze or other computer moderation software?

LibraryThing does not make network connections in to your servers or clients, but they do need to be able to connect out to us to get our content.

Any client that should load our enhancements in the OPAC (such as locked-down OPAC terminals) need to be able to make HTTP/HTTPS requests to our servers at the following addresses:

The staff computer(s) used to upload bibliographic data to us needs to be able to make HTTP or FTP requests to our servers at the following addresses, as well as the addresses above:

If you're setting up your firewall rules by domain name, you should just allow HTTP connections to *.librarything.com. Specifically, the main code is coming from "www.librarything.com", the data that gets loaded comes from "ltfl.librarything.com" and the images come from "static.librarything.com".

For the computer used to upload data to us, add fileupload.librarything.com.

We have two OPAC servers for our system. If we were to want to put LTFL on both servers, would this require a second LTFL account?

No. You can put the widgets and javascript into both servers, and they'll call the same data that we have for you. You may need to change your ISBN-based URL to not include the server name. Then the browser will "fill in the blanks" with whatever server you're currently on.

/search?/iMAGICNUMBER

instead of

http://alpha1.libraryname.lib.state.us:2082/search?/iMAGICNUMBER

How do I change the wording for the enhancements?

You can edit the words you see in the catalog (that describe the enhancement) to your language by logging into your account, choosing the 'Configure' tab, and opening each enhancement's custom code. In the "HTML if success" box, change 

 <div class="LT_label">Similar books:</div><div class="LT_widget_container">[[WIDGET]]</div> to your preferred term, for example <div class="LT_label">Samspeca libro:</div><div class="LT_widget_container">[[WIDGET]]</div>

To change the Reviews wording from 'Reviews:' use: 

<div class="ltfl_subhead">Your preferred euphemism</div>

Testing

How can we test out LTFL?

We have a number of ways of testing LTFL without bringing it live on your OPAC:

  1. Many libraries have a "test OPAC" or a "test skin." This is the easiest way to test it out.
  2. You can install LTFL but leave it in "testing mode." In this mode, the content does not display unless "testing=1" is manually added to the OPAC url.
  3. We have made a number of Firefox Greasemonkey scripts, allowing libraries to see LTFL in action on your OPAC without changing any files on your end.

We can help you figure out the best option for your library.


Statistics

Where can I see our statistics?

Log into your LTFL account (under 'sign in') here. Click on the 'Stats' tab near the top-left of the screen.

What do the statistics mean?

Coverage

Feature Use


Facebook app questions

How do we get our logo onto the Facebook app? If you want to add a logo, send the image file to Abby @ librarything.com

Miscellaneous

I used my LibraryThing account to tag a book. Why won't the tag show up in my OPAC?

As we filtered tags, we looked at what kind of tags a book has. To use Harry Potter as an example, many people have tagged it 'fiction' or 'magic'. Because people get to tag books with whatever they want, a book might have personal tags like 'blue shelf second row', or straight-up wrong tags like 'computer science'. By using popularity as an indicator at how 'right' the tags are, we sift out a lot of highly personal tags. So, for books in LTFL libraries to have new tags show up, the work must have a number of people who have all tagged it the same.