ConferenceThing at ALA Midwinter

Announcing "ConferenceThing," a free, mini-conference we're organizing to coincide with ALA Midwinter in Boston.*

When:	Friday, January 15, 2010
Where:	South Boston, very close to ALA Midwinter
Structure:	Mixed conference/unconference
Admission:	Free

We've wanted to do something like this for ages. Now that ALA is in Boston, home for Abby and Sonya, and a short drive from the main office in Portland, ME, we have the chance to do it—and do it up. We've chosen Friday, before the exhibitions open at 5pm.**

What we're planning:

• "Higher-level" conversations about the topics we care about—Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and the future of libraries and books. Many librarians are ready to move past the basics. A lot of us now spend most of our time thinking about this stuff!
• Learning, but no instruction. If you want to set up a Facebook page, get a book. If you want to talk about what works and what really doesn't in library social media, show up.
• Non-library people. The event will be open to everyone—LibraryThing members, librarians, etc. We're going to bring some interesting bookstore and publishing people. We think we're all in the same boat. And we're drifting. Let's talk about whom to eat first.
• Some sort of LibraryThing meetup and ALA party. We're looking around for something different. It might just be drinks at Bukowski's, but we're looking for something cooler. (We're shooting for the Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose books LibraryThing members cataloged.)

What to do

• Join the ConferenceThing LibraryThing group to talk about it, and plan things
• Follow @ConferenceThing on Twitter

---

*ConferenceThing is not affiliated with ALA Midwinter in any way, although we have the same tailor.
**Friday is also when most of the special sessions are planned. We're bumping up against a couple of events, including some by our friends in LITA. We're sorry about that, but there weren't any better options.

Open Shelves Classification: First draft live and at ALA Midwinter

If you're at ALA Midwinter in Denver on Saturday, come talk about this interesting new project. See below for details.

Back in July I blogged to start something called the Open Shelves Classification, a free, crowdsourced alternative to the Dewey Decimal System, and created a Group for it. Soon afterward two librarians, Laena M. McCarthy of the Pratt Institute and David Conners of Haverford took over leadership of the project. For the past six months they and a growing contingent of LibraryThing members, some librarians, some not, have been working to come up with basic principles and working on pieces and on the numbering system. They've also done some interesting work testing the proposed top level against real library records. Much of their work is collected on the Open Shelves Classification Wiki. Laena did a nice post on the OSC on the Public Libary Association blog.

The OSC team has reached some agreement on a first drag of the "top level categories," some fifty categories that, it is hoped, all books fit into somewhere. And you are invited to help classify works in LibraryThing!

Want to help? Go to a work page in LibraryThing and scroll down to the bottom. You'll find a chart of the top-level categories. If you see a good match, click on it. You'll be prompted to say whether you know the book yourself or not. And then you'll get to see how your classification vote match up with anyone else on the site.

You can classify anything in LibraryThing. If you want to help the most, however, click the "Find a random work" link here or below the classification chart. It'll take you to a random work, but also contrive to get multiple members classifying the same works. The idea is that it'll give us a good idea what categories are easy and obvious, and which are causing doubt.

Whatever you find, come and talk about it on the Open Shelves Classification group.

In Denver on Saturday? Laena and David are going to be at the ALA Midwinter show in Denver this weekend. (So are Sonya, Casey and I.) To move the OSC along we reserved a conference room at the Courtyard Marriott (Google Maps) from 1-3pm on Saturday, January 24th. Anyone at ALA is invited to come, as indeed are regular LibraryThing members--the Courtyard is outside the velvet rope.

LTFL at 33 34 36 / Abby and Tim at ALA

Casey has just updated our list of LibraryThing for Libraries customers. We've hit 33 libraries, which is wonderful. (See the full list.) With no sales force and only half a developer, that's fantastic. LTFL is clearly starting to matter in the library world. We will be adding resources to it accordingly, and look forward to finding out more about what current and potential libraries want from it.

Not coincidentally, Abby and I are going to ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia. We didn't buy a booth; they've expensive and tie you down a lot. Instead, we'll be going to as many talks as we can, meeting with people and describing cheesesteaks as a "business expense." If you're at ALA and want to chat in passing or over a beer, let us know.

Contact details:
tim@librarything
abigail@librarything.com
cell: 207 272-0553 (note area code 207, not 208, as first posted!)

UPDATE: Thirty-FOUR. As Casey whooped: "I totally outsold Jesus" (source). Then Casey dropped dead.
UPDATE 2: Thirty six. Holy smokes.