Thingology (LibraryThing's ideas blog)

The Long Tail of Ann Coulter

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:24:00 +0000

Here is are two charts showing the distribution of customer tags on Amazon.com for Ann Coulter's Godless: The Church of Liberalism. The first shows tags 1-25; the second all 881 tags.

The distribution is not too far from the classic "long tail" pattern common to social data. Although the common tags are common, fully 75% of the tags are used only once.

It's an even better example of another characteristic of social data, that "user generated content" is all about context, not just object. LibraryThing members and Amazon customers are tagging the same book. But while, on LibraryThing, where you have to have a book to tag it, Godless has a fairly unremarkable tag cloud, touching on its subject matter and point of view, on Amazon, the tagging has devolved into a shouting match. I don't think the people who tagged the book "asshat," "vomit" or "w h o r e" are using tagging as a memory aid ("I forget—what books did I think are 'asshat' anyway?"). They're using tagging as a sort of drive-by review.

Now, a case can be made that Amazon's tags are signaling something important—this is a "controversial" book indeed! The LibraryThing tag cloud doesn't show that as starkly. On balance, however, I think opinion tags corrupt the value of tagging.

Either way, I think this example demonstrates that tagging isn't a simple matter of putting users in front of taggable stuff.

Penn Libraries make movies

noreply@blogger.com (Abby) — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:35:00 +0000

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

Best Venn diagram

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:27:00 +0000

The popular website Very Short List picked up our I See Dead People's Books / Legacy Libraries for its daily feature. Great stuff.

Our Legacy Librares include such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, Sylvia Plath and Tupac Shakur.

VSL gives all of its stories a funny Venn diagram. I love ours!

The Algorithm, Doctorow, Fungus

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 04:23:00 +0000

"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.

Bhutan does the LibraryThing

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 04:12:00 +0000

Casey just added access to the National Library of Bhutan, the tiny and reclusive Himalayan nation. Bhutanese bibliophiles, come on in!

So, what record format do you think is employed by the National Library of Bhutan, a consecrated Buddhist temple housing a collection of mostly classical Tibetan manuscripts? Go ahead and think about it... It's DanMARC2, the Danish variant of MARC21. What?!

Apparently the Danish Royal Library is deeply involved with its Bhutanese brother through a so-called Library Twinning Project. You learn something new every day.

Two LibraryThing podcasts

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 02:07:00 +0000

John Houser of PALINET interviewed me for the PALINET Podcast (iTunes). It ended up syndicated as two short podcasts. I think they're some of the best short introductions to LibraryThing for librarians and of our project, LibraryThing for Libraries.

Part one. "In Part 1 of our conversation, we talked about LibraryThing generally and what you can do with it."
Part two. "In Part 2 of our conversation, we talked about LibraryThing for Libraries, achieving a critical mass of tags, and improving discovery in the library catalog."

PALINET's podcasts are my newest discovery--that and Uncontrolled Vocabulary. Recent shows include The WorldCat API and an interview with Joshua Ferraro of LibLime.

Why I don't work for a big organization

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 14:04:00 +0000

Tweet from a librarian I know:

"It amazes me that organizations skimp on the cheap stuff (disk space) and expect us to use our labor hours to tweeze through our inboxes."

I remember this was true at Houghton Mifflin, the Boston publisher where I worked. HM's installation of Lotus Notes gave us each only so much space. As the guy responsible for pulling together their ebooks*, my inbox was full of large files. I was perpetually up to my chin in water.

But this was six years ago, back when, although you knew what terabyte was, it sounded as far off as terraforming Mars or, say, a petabyte. That six years of Moore's law and the ready example of Gmail has smart, valuable people like picking through messages in her inbox to save space depresses to me no end.

Maybe I'm just touchy, but I have decided to NEVER suffer this kind of thing again. Because it's never just one thing, but a whole set of interlocking inflexibilities and ineptitudes that sap the spirit and undermine contentment and productivity. So I hope that LibraryThing has given me enough professional mojo that, even if it fails, I can choose to never again do computer work for an organization that doesn't understand computers.

*It looks like they're still using most of my code. It was cool in, um, 2001, anyway.

"Library 2.0 Gang" discusses Google Book Search API

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:53:00 +0000

Here's a quick heads-up for those interested in the Google Book Search API. Talis' new "Library 2.0 Gang," of which I will be an occasional member, covered the topic.

Importantly, they managed to get someone from Google, Frances Haugen, in on the call. Ms. Haugen was diplomatically non-committal about the terms of service, but telegraphed benign latitude.

I ended up talking too much (what's new), but I did surface the most interesting thing about the GBS API for Libraries: using their API to add free covers to the OPAC, and the rise of JavaScript-based OPAC enhancements. I covered the former here. The latter is also take-away from LibraryThing for Libraries.

Check it out here.

LibraryThing for Libraries, at CIL, with a new feature!

noreply@blogger.com (Sonya) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:33:00 +0000

LibraryThing will be at the Computers in Libraries conference in Washington, D.C. next week. We're showing off LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL) as exhibitors, demoing the enhancements available to libraries to make their online systems more Web 2.0., with a brand new feature.

If you're in the DC area, and are interested in coming and seeing how LTFL works within OPACs, or witnessing our rhinosaursi upgrade (now with 100% more roars!), you're in luck. We have free exhibit tickets, which gets you in to the exhibit hall (but not the conference sessions). Email me if you'd like to attend: sonya@librarything.com.

Computers in Libraries conference
Monday, April 7 - Wednesday April 9, 2008
Hyatt Regency Crystal City
2799 Jefferson Davis Highway, Arlington, VA

Shirky, Shirky, Shirky, Spalding

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:23:00 +0000

Four things you might enjoy listening to:

Clay Shirky, Berkman Center, book talk. Great talk about Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It looks to be a great book. (I thought I had finagled a free copy of it, but I think mine went to Abby instead.)
Clay Shirky at the Berkman Center, small-group talk. I missed this the first time around. It's excellent. Shirky gets in deep on what his book means for political protest, among other things, and he expresses the worst-case scenario for newspaper death perfectly. Fascinating.
IT Conversations: Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Clay Shirky. Great short interview. I was interested (and a bit surprised) to learn about Shirky's work for Libya.
IT Conversations: Jon Udell's "Interviews with Innovators" interviews, um, me. I put this last because I'm not that proud of it. Udell is interesting to talk to, and we ended up talking for almost two hours (the second half was mostly edited out), but I think we got off to a bumpy start with recommendations and ThingISBN. Excited as I was to go past the usual surface discussion, I ended up simply boring. The line also cuts out weirdly and I said Scoble when I meant Doc Searls. Enough self-flagellation!

Update: And more Shirky! Check out Shirky on the Brian Lehrer Show.

Amazon deletes competition

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:21:00 +0000

Having bought bought second-tier Print-on-Demand (POD) publisher BookSurge, Amazon is now working to shut down its competition. According to Publishers Weekly:

"According to talks with several pod houses, BookSurge has told them that unless their titles are printed by BookSurge, the buy buttons on Amazon for their titles will be disabled."

More at BookFinder Journal. The story broke on WritersWeekly.

Amazon's move should concern all publishers, and indeed readers. Amazon has always had a lot of leverage, but they haven't used it. That's clearly changing. The Kindle is already a monopoly product. Will they remove books published on the Sony Reader too?

Coincidentally, I've had POD on the brain; see this post for more on POD and libraries. I guess Amazon may solve libraries' problem with having too many POD publishers to follow.

UPDATE: Good, longer discussions and evidence of meme-spread can be found at BookTwo.org, TeleRead, The Wall Street Journal, Wired Epicenter Blog, Techcrunch, Eoin Purcell. I think it's significant that the story has crossed the gap from the POD and general book trade to personal LJ pages and niche outlets like Christian Writers Marketplace and The Wild Hunt ("Will Amazon Hurt Small Pagan Publishers?"). For a continuous stream, check out this Google Blog Search for "Booksurge." My survey found 90% of the posts had hostile titles with the remaining 10% being hostile only in their content.

For book-industry bloggers, and particularly the POD people, this has become something of an I-am-Spartacus moment. (Of course, those guys all died.) The manager of Dashbooks, a POD publisher that makes most of its money off Amazon, writes of the "liquid courage" (margaritas) that led to their post on the topic. Certainly I hesitated a moment before posting. Let's see what our Amazon-funded competitor has to say about Amazon's move...

Getting real: Libraries are missing books

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 03:41:00 +0000

Back in March 2006, Jason Fried and his company 37Signals released the book Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application. Originally available in PDF format only, in October Fried released a paper version, produced by Lulu.com, and a free HTML version.

Getting Real is an important book. It came along at exactly the right time, said something important. To the extent the greap web-app "explosion" of 2004-2007 had a book, this was it.

And it was successful. According to 37Signals the (paid) version has sold has 30,000 copies. It's the number six seller on Lulu.com. Passionate, unpaid fans have produced translations into thirteen languages. Google records 166,000 mentions. Even on LibraryThing, where the book had to be manually entered and there is a bias toward the printed version, 37 members have listed it.

Did libraries notice? Not at all.

OCLC's WorldCat records exactly three copies—MIT, California Polytechnic and the University of Nebraska. That's three copies of one of the top tech books of the 00's in most of the US libraries that matter. The Library of Congress? New York Public? Harvard? None of them. For comparison, WorldCat contains 619 copies of Solitary sex : a cultural history of masturbation.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. Lulu, the online, no-editors, print-on-demand publisher that 37Signals turned to is almost completely ignored by libraries. Take a look at its 100 top-sellers and run the books through WorldCat. I made a start: Lulu's most popular book, something about ecommerce, is held by NO library in WorldCat. The second, How to Become an Alpha Male, is held by just two.

Let's be clear, Lulu publishes a lot of crap! But it's not all crap. And even if it were, publishers like Lulu represent a significant event in the history of publishing—an event libraries should be trying to capture. Lulu isn't some obscure novelty—it already gets twice the web traffic of HarperCollins.

I am a passionate defender of libraries and library data—of the relevance of libraries now and going forward. LibraryThing is the only significant service of its kind to use library data and to link liberally to libraries. I believe in the expertise to choose and classify—that innovations like social cataloging and tagging supplement but do not replace expert classification. LibraryThing has as many librarians as programmers. I like blogs, but I love books.

But this throws me completely. How could libraries miss this?

Thanks to LibraryThing members for bringing this topic up.

Addendum (moved from comments): I'm not that concerned about regular public libraries, excluding the Bostons and the NYPLs. They're about access more than comprehensiveness and preservation. These books are available. I think it would be great if one of the jobbers added Lulu to their list, and the top-selling Lulu books were found in large publics, but I have my eye on academics.

Take the number two book—"How to be an alpha male." Many universities have large and active gender-studies departments. Taking GR's numbers and assuming a long-tail distribution of sales, we can guess that book has cleared 60-100,000 copies. I suspect that if HarperCollins or Random House published such a book, they'd be all over it, and not because of any notion of "quality." They'd get it because it would be an important document of American gender identity.

Instead, I'm afraid its absense is a document of American publisher- and librarian-identity.

LibraryThing doubles its conference budget

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:44:00 +0000

Sonya just iPhoned us the LibraryThing for Libraries booth at PLA in Minneapolis, which is starting now.

The rhino has its origin in conference rules that prohibit exhibitors from doing too much of their own setup. At CIL2007 the rule was no more than what one person could carry in one trip, without a hand-truck.

Well, what can one person carry that fills up some of a 10x10 space? An inflatable animal, of course!

There is no meaning; It's an absurdist joke—a protest against the vacuity of conference selling. Still, it does line up with some of what LibraryThing and LibraryThing for Libraries is all about:

We're not a "vendor." Vendors bribe you with tchochkes. They erect gorgeous displays, adorned with orthodontically homogenous and racially diverse "patrons" grinning about some irrelevant, overpriced and boring piece of technology.
We are cheap. LibraryThing for Libraries costs what it costs. Sonya's sleeping with friends and she flew cargo, but we spent a few thousand dollars to own a 10x10 booth for three days. The internet alone cost us $1,000. This is rip-job enough, and some library will be paying for it. If we ordered fancy chairs we'd have to charge them another $500. Who wants that?
LibraryThing for Libraries "sells itself." At first I didn't even want Sonya to make fliers, for fear some people will grab the flier and not see it for real.

Anyway, if you're at PLA, stop by (booth 1652). If not, but you're in Portland, ME or Cambridge, MA, send us a note. We might even spring for wine—something we do not skimp on.

PS: Even if you have no interest in LibraryThing for Libraries, help Sonya figure out how to make the rhinos roar. It says they do on the box, and there's some sort of speaker on the foot, but we can't figure out how.

LibraryThing at PLA

noreply@blogger.com (Sonya) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:16:00 +0000

Greetings from sunny Minneapolis!

The LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL) contingent will be at the Public Libraries Association conference this week, holding court in the exhibit hall. Our booth number is #1652, which you should definitely visit if you're going to be at this fine affair.

We're there to spread the word: recommended reads CAN be in your OPAC. Your patrons SHALL experience the exquisite joy that is tag browsing. You WILL be amazed how easy it is to implement.

We'll be showing off our amazing OPAC enhancement tool, featuring libraries who have implemented LTFL. You can witness firsthand how seamless the enhancements look in WebPac Pro, HIP and others.

You'll know our booth by the giant rhinos.

First cut: Works JSON API

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:24:00 +0000

I've finished a simple Javascript/JSON API to LibraryThing's core work information. In structure and implementation the API resembles Google's recent Book Search API, but for LibraryThing.

Purpose. The API is designed to help libraries and others to add links to LibraryThing when LibraryThing has a book, and omit them when we don't. It's an easy conditional-linking system.

But the API returns other work information too, including the number of copies, number of reviews and average rating (with rating image). It comes with a simple function to insert the data where appropriate, but you can funnel this information to functions of your own devising.

Scope. This is an API to work information. Once I've worked through the kinks here, I plan to release a member API, allowing members to do clever things with their data. For example, members will be able to make their own widgets, not just rely on ours.

How it works. The basic mode of operation is to insert a script as follows:

<script src="http://www.librarything.com/api/json/workinfo.js?ids=*******"></script>

The ******* is reserved for the ISBNs you want to look up on LibraryThing, separated by commas. NOTE: This script should be placed at the bottom of the page.

For example, the JSON API Test includes one ISBN-10, one ISBN-13, one LCCN and one OCLC number.

<script src="http://athena.librarything.com/api/json/workinfo.js?ids=0066212898,9780520042728,99030698,ocn8474750911"></script>

The script returns a hunk of JavaScript, including both the simple function and the JSON hash with all the book data. The hash is sent to a function of your choosing, or the simple LT_addLibraryThinglinks by default. To name another callback function add &callback= and the function name to the URL.

The function LT_addLibraryThinglinks looks for elements (DIVs, SPANs, etc.) with the ID "LT_xxx" where xxx is one of your identifiers. If LibraryThing has a work, it adds "(See on LibraryThing)", with link. If not, it does nothing.

Here's the JavaScript returned for the URL above:

LT_addLibraryThinglinks(
{
"0066212898":
{"id":"0066212898","type":"isbn","work":"3702986","link":"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/work\/3702986","copies":"105","reviews":"7","rating":8.33,"rating_img":"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/pics\/ss8.gif"},
"9780520042728":
{"id":"9780520042728","type":"isbn","work":"44723","link":"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/work\/44723","copies":"92","reviews":"3","rating":8.47,"rating_img":"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/pics\/ss8.gif"},
"99030698":
{"id":"99030698","type":"lccn","work":"32155","link":"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/work\/32155","copies":"345","reviews":"10","rating":7.8,"rating_img":"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/pics\/ss8.gif"},
"ocn8474750911":
{"id":"ocn8474750911","type":"oclc","work":"4161224","link":"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/work\/4161224","copies":"1","reviews":"0","rating":0,"rating_img":""}}
);

More later. It's 2:48am and need to get to bed. There's much more to say, of course.

Monday link round-up

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:50:00 +0000

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)

Moving and Shaking!

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 05:17:00 +0000

I'm excited to say that Library Journal has picked me as one of their 2008 Movers and Shakers, "The People Shaping the Future of Libraries." Here's the full list, the intro and the blurb on me. (I'm on bottom right in the photo too!)

The full list makes for interesting reading. Jessamyn has a version of the list that includes names, not just our fanciful titles. ("Metadata Man"? Can't I be "Spark Plug" or "On a mission?") Certainly a lot more happens with libraries than I ever think about. Update: Bobbi Newman has a version with blogs too.

Movers and Shakers been going on since 2002, long before LibraryThing thrust me into the library world. A number of my favorite library bloggers and technologists have won it before, including Jessamyn West, Steven Cohen, John Blyberg, Meredith Farkas, Nicole Engard, Emily Lynema and Casey Bisson.

As much as I want to congratulate people, I know few of the current batch, and wouldn't have much to add. I do know Josh Ferraro of LibLime. LibLime is the driving force behind the open-source library system, Koha, that is suddenly on everyone's lips. We're eager to get LibraryThing data into Koha—beyond LibraryThing for Libraries, which already works—but Liblime may be too busy scaling to write the code anytime soon.* Fortunately, unlike all the closed systems, if LibLime can't do it, we can do it ourselves. That kinds of openness is just one of the many reasons Koha is taking over the world.

Four others caught my eye:

Marshall Shore ("The Man Who Said No to Dewey"). Shore is the guy behind Maricopa's move from Dewey to a modified BISAC system. I have mixed feelings about BISAC, but Dewey needs to be replaced, and experiments are good. I met with a member of his team at a conference; I'm eager to get their system into LibraryThing and they indicated they were willing.

Maria Redburn, Bedford Public Library. I've never met Ms. Redburn, but Bedford, a small-ish town in Texas, was the second library to enhance their catalog with LibraryThing for Libraries. Apparently Redburn took over in rocky times--the town was considering outsourcing library management to a company in Delaware. She turned the library around, winning approval for local control, expanded service and a new focus on customer service. Good stuff!

Darci Hanning, the force behind the Plinkit project, which provides free, low-hassle websites for libraries. I only heard about them two days ago; Casey is a big fan, and has a blog post about it coming up.

Mark Greek, DC Public Library. Greek worked to rescue and preserve rare materials from the Georgetown Neighborhood Library, devastated in a fire. That was my local library when I lived in DC, so a big thumb-up from me!

As for me, I think the blurb hits all the right notes: LibraryThings roots in cataloging, the social aspects, LibraryThing for Libraries and MARCThing (launched, but not yet accessible outside). But the best part is the closing quote by Karen Schneider:

"Tim has ported the fun of reading to the web and in doing so honors the best of our profession and suggests a path for its future."

As someone outside of the profession, that's pretty gratifying to hear.**

*I need to dust off my PERL though!
**I'm also the first recipient from Maine, which seems wrong, both because there are a lot of innovative librarians in Maine and because I'm a "blow-in."

Free covers for your library, from Google

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 05:27:00 +0000

On Wednesday we added integration with Google Book Search, and talked about it on the main blog. We did it together with a number of cool libraries.

My thoughts are still percolating, but I wanted to throw out a piece of my ham-handed JavaScript code. The code gives your library covers, something libraries usually pay for.

This basic grabs cover images from Google. You feed it an ISBN and it gets the cover. It doesn't link to them. Would they mind? Maybe.

<div id="gbsthumbnail"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">

/* GBS Cover Script by Tim Spalding/LibraryThing */

function addTheCover(booksInfo)
{
for (i in booksInfo)
 {
 var book = booksInfo[i];
 if (book.thumbnail_url != undefined)
  {
  document.getElementById('gbsthumbnail').innerHTML =
   '<img src="' + book.thumbnail_url + '"/>';
  }
 }
}

</script>

<script src="http://books.google.com/books?jscmd=viewapi&bibkeys=ISBN:0670880728&callback=addTheCover"></script>

Here's a version that links to them, but only if they have a full version. Surely they wouldn't mind this.

<div id="gbsthumbnail"></div>
<div id="gbslink"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">

/* GBS Cover Script by Tim Spalding/LibraryThing */

function addTheCover(booksInfo)
{
var gbsnameA = new Array("No information", "Book info", "Partial view", "Full view");

for (i in booksInfo)
 {
 var book = booksInfo[i];
 
 var quality = 0;
 if(book.preview == "noview") { quality = 1; }
 if(book.preview == "partial") { quality = 2; }
 if(book.preview == "full")  { quality = 3; }
 
 if (book.thumbnail_url != undefined)
  {
  document.getElementById('gbsthumbnail').innerHTML =
   '<img src="' + book.thumbnail_url + '">';
  }
 if (quality > 3)
  {
  document.getElementById('gbslink').innerHTML =
   "<a href=\'" + book.preview_url + "\'>" + "Google Books: " + gbsnameA[quality] + "</a>";
  }
 }
}

</script>

<script src="http://books.google.com/books?jscmd=viewapi&bibkeys=ISBN:0670880728&callback=addTheCover"></script>

So, book covers for the price of an occasional link to Google. Sounds like a good deal to me!

If this saves your library money, consider getting LibraryThing for Libraries. We're clever all over.

LibraryThing for Libraries adds statistics

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:09:00 +0000

LibraryThing for Libraries now has stats! Libraries in the program can see just where LibraryThing for Libraries is working for them, and where it's not. You can evaluate changes, and justify it to your bosses.

To see your statistics, go to the Stats tab. Statistics include:

Real-world coverage numbers and percentages for each enhancement
Recommendation and similar books link-usage
Tag popup and search usage

The tab itself is basic, but we included a link to download your statistics in CSV/Excel format. Pie charts? Go crazy.

Of course, statistics are a two-edged sword for us. Although overall rates are good, some libraries aren't getting the best results. In general, if you're hiding your enhancements behind a tab, you can expect much lower rates.

We certainly suspect that LibraryThing enhancements are getting a lot more play than some other browse links—like LCSH subjects—or those of our competitors', who put their enhancements on external pages. Indeed, we're wondering if libraries would like to use LTFL's stats structure to track other links too?

LibraryThing for Libraries Email List. We've set up a Google Group for LibraryThing for Libraries customers. We hope member libraries will join up. We've sent out invites to all the primary contacts.

Sign up to have your voice heard. We will be talking about the future of LTFL and where it should go.

Street-grade metadata of unknown origin and quality

noreply@blogger.com (Casey Durfee) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:54:00 +0000

"Steroid" Scandal Rocks Major League Libraries:

Why not make the top quality stuff available to everyone? That’s the only way to really level the playing field,” says metadata advocate Harley Trion. “If we close down the labs creating high-quality metadata, you will see widespread adoption of street-quality metadata like social tagging and folksonomies, because that’s all you will be able to get. I’d rather know that my kids were using metadata that is made in a clean lab with experts and quality assurance processes than have them experimenting with street-grade metadata of unknown origin and quality.”

Sadly, street-grade metadata has already polluted our most venerable cataloging institution, the Library of Congress. Check out this MARC record for Fourth Comings, by Megan McCafferty (interesting part in bold):
=LDR 01506cam 2200361 a 4500 =001 14768798 =005 20070917102332.0 =008 070314s2007\\\\nyu\\\\\\\\\\\000\1\eng\\ =010 \\$a 2007010818 =020 \\$a9780307346506 =020 \\$a0307346501 =035 \\$a(OCoLC)ocm86109925 =035 \\$a(OCoLC)86109925 =040 \\$aDLC$cDLC$dYDX$dBAKER$dBTCTA$dWIQ$dYDXCP$dDLC =043 \\$an-us-ny =050 00$aPS3613.C34$bF68 2007 =082 00$a813/.6$222 =100 1\$aMcCafferty, Megan. =245 10$aFourth comings :$ba novel /$cMegan McCafferty. =250 \\$a1st ed. =260 \\$aNew York :$bCrown Publishers,$cc2007. =300 \\$a310 p. ;$c25 cm. =650 \0$aDarling, Jessica (Fictitious character)$vFiction. =650 \0$aYoung women$vFiction. =650 \0$aPeriodicals$xPublishing$vFiction. =650 \0$aChick lit. =651 \0$aBrooklyn (New York, N.Y.)$vFiction. =856 42$3Contributor biographical information$uhttp://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0743/2007010818-b.html =856 42$3Publisher description$uhttp://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0743/2007010818-d.html =856 41$3Sample text$uhttp://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0743/2007010818-s.html
Chick Lit is now a subject heading in the Library of Congress. We've entered the asterisk era of metadata.

[Tim adds: I've known about the Chick Lit LCSH for some time now, first spotting it while giving a talk on how great the Chick Lit tag was! I think it's a great move, but also strange in light of well-established policies against adding subjects afterwards. The LCSH "Chick Lit" missed chick lit's actual heyday! Anyway, I'm not betting on the LC getting into all the great tags—steampunk, cyberpunk, paranormal romance and, of course, vampire smut.]

Where are the libraries? Where are the bookstores?

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:51:00 +0000

I haven't blogged about LibraryThing Local here, on Thingology. So, for the benefit of those who don't read the main blog, LibraryThing Local is a new sub-site devoted to finding, mapping and describing the world's bookstore, library, book fair and festival—as well as all the readings, signings, lectures and other events they host. Open to all for three days now, LibraryThing Local just hit 10,000 venues—all user-contributed.

As it grows, LibraryThing Local is geting more interesting. Below are some interesting visualizations of where the world's cities have bookstores (green dots), versus where they have libraries (blue dots).


Cambridge, MA	Dublin, Ireland

Sydney, Australia	Chicago, IL

Toronto, Canada	Houston, TX

Minneapolis, MN	Los Angeles, CA*

Although none of the maps—with the possible exception of Cambridge—are complete, and not all the libraries are public, the pattern is clear: Bookstores cluster together in the high-traffic center; public library branches spread out into the outlying areas and are separated from each other evenly like identically-polarized magnets.

I don't think this basic fact will come as a surprise to many, but it's striking even so. It's worth thinking about why these two institutions—so different but also sharing much—are positioned so differently in space.

I think the easiest explanation is the difference between economics and politics. Economics favors businesses that can create the most amount of happiness—which is to say revenue— whether or not this makes access difficult for some people. Representative politics favors solutions that give all citizens good or equal access to the resource, even if the resultant distribution is inefficient in economic terms.

So, bookstores go where they're going to survive and grow. High-traffic areas are best for that, and competition isn't necessarily damaging and may even be good.** By contrast, library branches are never clustered together, which would seem inefficient. And towns position branches, either directly or through a process grounded in neighborhood representation, to ensure that no area is left out.

That's my take. There are, I'm sure, other good explanations. Here are some:

Google Maps dots are all the same size, but a city's main library is generally far larger than any branch library, and far larger, compared to a branch library, than city bookstores are to peripheral bookstores. If a city's main library were broken into bookstore-sized chunks, libraries would seem to cluster indeed!
Libraries focus more on services to families, which naturally sends them where the families are.
Libraries are often positioned near schools, which show a similar regional distribution.
LibraryThing Local probably underestimates peripheral bookstores. Library branches are generally easy to find, but you need to know where a bookstore is to find it. You're more likely to know the big downtown bookstores.

Food for thought?

*Los Angeles is the anti-case. It's so spread-out that the bookstores have nowhere to cluster.
**Take Ann Arbor's Shaman Drum, an independent, the national flagship Borders, and the excellent used bookstore Dawn Treader are arrayed in a tidy row.

Taxation without web presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Casey Durfee) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:03:00 +0000

The Library of Congress recently signed a deal to accept 3 million dollars worth of "technology, services and funding" from Microsoft towards building a new website powered by Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in. I (Casey) usually leave the blogging to Tim, but I've got to say something about this.

Microsoft, in general, is very good to libraries, and libraries are very good to them. Microsoft gets huge tax breaks for donating software licenses -- something that doesn't really cost them a thing -- and libraries get software they couldn't afford otherwise.

This is a different beast, however. It sounds like Microsoft technologies will be used from the ground-up -- if you use Microsoft's Silverlight to do the front-end, your developers pretty much have to use Visual Studio and Microsoft languages, your database admins have to use MS SQL Server, and your systems admins have to use Windows and IIS. In any case, it seems unlikely that Microsoft would consult on a project and not recommend you use Microsoft as much as possible.

Once you're locked in to the entire Microsoft stack, you pretty much can't change a single piece without completely redoing your entire IT operation from top-to-bottom. When the free deal expires or you need new servers, you end up having to buy new Microsoft licenses and software. It's like giving somebody a kitten for a present -- they'll still be paying for and cleaning up after your gift 10 years from now.

Most disturbingly, users are locked in, too: anybody using an iPhone, an old version of Windows, any version of Linux, or any other operating system or device not supported by Silverlight will be unable to use the Library of Congress' new website. How is that compatible with the principles of democracy or librarianship? It's taxation without web presentation. And how exactly is that a quantum leap forward? (If the LOC really wanted to make a quantum leap, it would open up its data.)

Giant package deals are the wrong way to make both technical and business decisions about software; it doesn't matter who's doing the packaging, or how. You should be able to use the best operating system for the job, the best database for the job, and the best programming language for the job. You should be able to hire developers and systems administrators, not Microsoft developers and Windows administrators, and should give them the freedom to use the best solution, not the Microsoft solution. Sometimes the Microsoft solution is best, sometimes it isn't, but that's something that shouldn't be dictated unilaterally.

"I take comfort when I see one of our competitors looking to hire Microsoft developers instead of software developers, for reasons the hacker/entrepreneur Paul Graham explained well:

If you ever do find yourself working for a startup, here's a handy tip for evaluating competitors. Read their job listings. Everything else on their site may be stock photos or the prose equivalent, but the job listings have to be specific about what they want, or they'll get the wrong candidates."

"During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried."

But it's disappointing to see an institution you respect, admire, and fund with your tax dollars going down that same road. It's even more disappointing because the Library of Congress does make smart decisions about technology. They announced another major project a few months back that took an entirely different approach to selecting the tools they would use. The people behind the World Digital Library sat down and thought about the best tools for the job, and they came up with an interesting and eclectic list: "python, django, postgres, jquery, solr, tilecache, ubuntu, trac, subversion, vmware". Those tools are free, open-source, designed with developer productivity in mind, aren't tightly linked to each other, and don't inherently limit who can access your website. That's what should matter.

ThingISBN adds LCCNs, OCLC numbers

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 05:32:00 +0000

ThingISBN, our popular ISBN-based API, supports and returns data for two more identifiers: LCCN and OCLC.

At core, ThingISBN—blogged before here and here—takes an ISBN and returns a simple XML list of other ISBNs, corresponding to other "editions" of the work, eg.

http://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/0590353403

Now, if you add &allids=1 to the ISBN, the XML will include relevant LCCN and OCLC numbers, eg.

http://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/0590353403&allids=1

You can also feed ThingISBN both numbers, eg.,

http://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/lccn97039059
http://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/ocm37975719

If you feed it an LCCN or an OCLC number you don't need to add "&allids=1" to get back these identifiers.

What's next?

I haven't added LCCNs and OCLC numbers to the ThingISBN feed, yet.
Although there are some details to be worked out, this advance looks forward to adding support for LCCNs and OCLC numbers to LibraryThing for Libraries.

Tell us what's going on. I know that ThingISBN gets a lot of use, some of it even in accordance with its Terms of Use. If you're using ThingISBN, I'd love to hear how on a new wiki page I've created, Projects Currently Using ThingISBN.

Caveat. ThingISBN is free for non-commercial use. Commercial use requires our say-so. Read more here.

In the news! Coincidentally, LCCNs are in the news this week. Yesterday, the Library of Congress announced a "LCCN Permalink," a smart bid to convert a vital but underused set of permanent, unique IDs, the LCCN (Library of Congress Control Number), into the regnant permanent, unqiue ID, the URL. See Catalogablog for the announcement.

We're ready for Masonic control now, please.

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:56:00 +0000

Whenever I talk about LibraryThing among librarians I mention all the libraries that generally fall beneath their radar—churches, historical societies, house museums, birthing centers, Masonic lodges—and how LibraryThing is great for them. In fact, we've done smashingly among churches (and a number of synagogues and temples), and well enough with the others, but I don't think we have a single Masonic lodge!

Something is clearly wrong. Are the Masons against us? Are the Masons supporting Shelfari?

The recent anniversary of the Great Seal of the United States got me thinking. What if we made our sympathies clear? So we've redesigned the Great Seal of LibraryThing (formerly the Orca). Social-Networking World domination here were come.

Translations: "He approves our tags." "A new order of books."

Harry Potter and the Copyright Lawyers

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 19:20:00 +0000

The New York Times has an interesting piece on Rowling's attempt to stop the publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon, based on the website of the same name. Needless to say, the internet has transformed the cultural background of copyright law. As Lessig put it in the article, if claims like Rowlings' are valid, the web is turning out a "whole generation of criminals."

I'd be interested to read some specifics about the HPL's approach, and Rowling's charges there. In legal arguments over copyright, details matter. Commentary and criticism are one thing; excessive copying is another.

From the website, it seems that long quotations are rare or absent, and that many of the entries are synthetic or analytical in nature. Some of the essays, like "Wizard Banking" or "British Schooling in the 1970s?" read like those deadly mini-articles from the Transactions of the American Philological Society. And can anyone claim that the analytical and speculative "Religion in the Wizarding World" isn't protected?

One of the key notions of US copyright law is the distinction between fact and expression. At its most basic, this means that you can write about the dimensions of the pyramids or the life of JFK, but you can't describe them in the same words as I did. In this way, nobody "owns" a fact, no matter how much trouble it took to collect or how interesting it is. It doesn't even have to be a true fact. It just has to intend or purport to be one.

When it comes to fiction, however, the line is blurry. That J. K. Rowling wrote a series of books about a character named Harry Potter is certainly a fact. But where do we draw the line? Is it a fact that, as the HPL explains, the diadem of Ravenclaw is "etched with the words, 'Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure.'"? The diadem doesn't exit. It's a product of Rowling's imagination. And does it matter that the HPL uses "etched with the words" and Rowling used "there were tiny words etched into it"?

I would love to see the fact-expression extended to cover "literary facts," to allow authors to write about Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore as they would JFK—stick to the facts and avoid pulling a Doris Kearns Goodwin. Unfortunately, that's not where the law is.

Hat tip: David Weinberger.