Compare your library with others'

Here's the blog post:
http://www.librarything.com/blog/2009/05/compare-your-library-with-others.php

hahaha don't we always....

Fun.

I think, if anyone had asked me I'd have prefered collections or Bug Fixes first, but fun anyway.

Don't see a lot of difference between shared books books, and top books. I guess its in the details lower down.

How does it rank books with equal numbers of people? Alpha by title? alpha by first shared person name? random?

That only took 3 messages. I think the over/under was 10.

4: I think (but not sure) the books are listed in the order they were added. I also second your first 3 remarks.

Could Tim explain the difference between the shared books books and top books. My mind doesn't work in mathematical/data crunching ways so it would be nice to have it spelled out.

Also at the bottom of shared books, people is this:

top 50 similar libraries that share no books with vaneska

Total: 0 libraries

None

911,873

which I don't understand at all - is there any point to its existence and if so, what is it?

v

Top 50 similar libraries I share no books with - you're right, I hadn't noticed that one. Love it 'cause it's silly!

Oh I like silliness :) Along with friends's and connections's ;)

v

It looks good. Thanks.

There appears to be a small bug
Warning: imagecreatefromgif(): 'picsizes/3e/20/372cccdad70eb3361cda038f0f39bc6b.GIF' is not a valid GIF file in /var/www/html/inc_photo_upload.php on line 289 Warning: imagecopyresampled(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /var/www/html/inc_photo_upload.php on line 297
in my Top 50 Similar Libraries, sorted by People, I think.

I get a choice between a time-out "Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /var/www/html/inc_librarything.php on line 1662" or the loading gif - haven't got to see any results yet.

Hey, how come he gets a choice? I *want* a choice of errors. *pouts*

"Could Tim explain the difference between the shared books books and top books"

I think shared books are books you and they own. Top books is just books that they own (you may do so as well but that isn't taken inot account)

42 of my 50 most similar libraries share the same book. Anyone manage to find a book shared by all 50? more than one?!

If I take "Top Books" I seem to get connections between my friends (or whichever other category you choose) of books not necessarily owned by me as well.

> 12: I max out at 28.

So this is a visual rendition of Members With Your books from the Profile Page?

When I was looking at Shared Books, People (friends) it seemed to go on forever with a list of books. Is it possible to only list a few books with a (more) link for the rest ? That way you can see the people you share with better.

I think that's just because you share a lot of books with your friends. I get a much shorter list than you.

12: Ah I get you, thanks. There are only a couple of titles in the Top 50 which I don't have so it wasn't at all obvious to me.

27 is the maximum I have for a shared book.

v

My first person shares 590 books with me. My second shares 561. I gave up looking for the 3rd.

I think 41 or 42 was the book that the highest number of 50 similar libraries shared with me, but as more people are discovering this feature, I can no longer check because it times out all the time. Too many books...

Chris: The over/under cracked me up.

GrayHead: Nice to see you in the postings again.

ETA: I posted greetings, and then went to check it out. Got a problem: it won't load. The wheel goes 'round, but...nada. When you get a minute. (FF3, Windows XP)

> 12 Re: top shared with 50 similar libraries --- I've got 46 out of 50, with Madame Bovary. 50 *would* have been cool - hope someone posts that they have that - but 46 is pretty neat! :-)

OK, gotta get to work now, gotta play later ...

Fixed. Thanks. I'm having fun with all the different permutations.

I think, if anyone had asked me I'd have prefered collections or Bug Fixes first, but fun anyway.

I was on collections much of the night—it's released to ?6 people. Chris' list is way longer than mine right now. Also, I think of this as a not-leaving-loose-ends issue. This is a natural extension of the logic that went into Legacy Libraries—and much more interesting to people. I said I'd be extending it, and so I followed through!

Could Tim explain the difference between the shared books books and top books. My mind doesn't work in mathematical/data crunching ways so it would be nice to have it spelled out.

Shared books are the most popular books in the group you yourself also have. Top books is the most popular books in the group, whether you have them or not.

which I don't understand at all - is there any point to its existence and if so, what is it?

I should probably kill that section if there are no libraries. The point is to divide the list into people who share and people who don't.

The 911,873 is a debug thing--the size of the page. I'll get rid of it soon.

Greyhead

Yeah. Something's going on with the memory and your 6k books. I'll look at it later.

Hmmm. Which list are you getting it for. It's working for me. It may be that, when you were hitting it, none of your list-people were in working memory (RAM). This means a lot of trips to the database. No maybe they are so it's fast and functional.

GrayHead: Nice to see you in the postings again.

Very true (tips hat).

I get the error:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /var/www/html/inc_shortcuts.php on line 857

I don't know if it is because:
1. Everyone is trying this at the same time
or
2. bluetyson is one of my connections (not to mention that alot of my top 50 similar libraries have a TON of books)

Initially I thought it was because I am using IE6, but happened with FF3 as well.

I don't know if it is related but the "Members with your books." section of the profile won't load either - same error as above but the line is 855 for one browswer and 856 for the other.

I wonder: in the Top Books bit, would it be possible to have a sublist of those books in the list which I do not own? Or perhaps better, could you add that green tick to the titles I own so that it is easy to see the ones that I don't?

v

I have 9k books. Apparently none of them are shared with top 50 libraries.
However, when I compare with friends/interesting libraries, I get many shares.
I used to share lots of books with many other libraries.

Is this another memory issue ?

I think there is a problem with the top 50 libraries, mine won't load either. It swirls and then Safari says there was an error, but it doesn't show up on screen. It just stays blank under the headers.

I am at work on Safari 2.X OSX

> 24

I was just about to suggest that. I was trying to do it by going through the list by eye, but gave up after about no. 30. It would be particularly useful for finding books that somehow are not catalogued or are not commbined correctly.

Wow. It's quite revealing in some ways about the connection algorithm. I have a largely complete set of books from one series, that of GURPS Basic Set (41 copies among my friends) and friends. On my top books, the first 30 are from that series. Out of the top 70 books, only 8--the Hobbit, the Silmarillion and the first six Harry Potter books--aren't from that series.

I'd say it also should feed into the recommendations system; while one could argue whether or not the Silmarillion and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix should be higher in my listings, it's disturbing that American Gods, which is 71st on top books (with me owning the vast majority of its predecessors) has never shown up on my recommendations. (Yeah, I save them to disk.) In fact, many of the books that are showing high on this list aren't showing up at all on my recommendations. As vaneska said, it'd be nice to have a list of the top books you don't own.

No 50, only 46, for Dune.

I have to say I find it amusing that TimSpalding has for his first book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling at 13 copies among his 50 closest friends, whereas I have Street Samurai Catalog/Shadowrun 7104 as my 237th book at 13 copies among my 50 closest friends, and even among our books I think that's just a coincidental correspondence of the flotsam and jetsam that has washed up in our libraries.

Tim, again, private data is showing up. If I've got a private member listed on my private watch list or interesting libraries {eta or as a friend}, I can see his/her information here.

ETA: I can see my own (private) information showing up on my friends' "compare connection" pages, and on pages of people who have me listed as an interesting library. Private data shows up when you select by "friends," "interesting libraries," or "private watch list" but it doesn't seem to be happening for "top 50 similar libraries."

Is there any way to make "shared books, people" collapsable? I share several hundred books with many of the people on my list, and that means the page is very long, and that right now I can only be bothered to scroll through the first 2 or 3 people.

I asked for that in #14, but Tim didn't answer it when he posted.

I never got to the 3rd person, I gave up after 2 (#17)

33. Apologies, I must have missed your message. Well, I agree!

seconding thirding #32 & #14 > "Shared books, people" could seriously use a "show/hide" feature.

eta: Also, the language used to describe the share features was confusing to me on the LL debut, and it continues to be confusing. One suggestion:

: Shared books (by book)
: Shared books (by person)
: Top books

I'd prefer to do something a little more descriptive for "Top books", too -- "Most popular books"? or even "Popular books"? But disambiguating the "shared books, x" choices would really make me happy.

How hard would it be to make it not default to "friends" for people who haven't designated any "friends"?

Also, I agree that "shared books, people" either needs a "show/hide" or an easy way to jump to the next person, or I'll miss them entirely when trying to scroll down past the hundreds of books I share with bluetyson.

35> Or even a 10-ish book cutoff with a "show more..."

36 - agreed, even thought I now have a few friends (3). It would be nice if it would default to top 50 similar libraries or something that's useful for everyone.

You are close to a feature I've wanted since my day 5: what books does X own that I don't or what do I own that X doesn't where X is an out-of-state IRL friend also on librarything. The former for ILL purposes (doens't everyone travel with more books than clothes by weight?) and the latter for gift-buying purposes.

14/17/37: A max of 10-20 listed books with a more link would be nice.

24 would be lovely, although the green checkmark system is going to be reworked "soon" as far as I know.

Tim: any chance of getting the "top books on LibraryThing that you don't have" back?

28: *nod* If a bunch of my "top 50 similar libraries" have a book, and I don't... it should show in recommendations. Or even have a separate list that way for recommendations.

Can we have a list of the top 50 libraries somewhere?

It might be good to link this new page directly to and from the Connections News page. That seems like an obvious navigation path.

Private info thing was fixed about 1:30 ago. Sorry not to reply here earlier, and for the bug.

I've got to read and respond from message #23 on, but I can't do it right now.

43. Thanks!

On "Top books" can I ask that we get the green checkmarks to show the books that we do own when comparing these against the general books?

Also, could we get one against the Zeitgeist list of Top Books compared to our friends/connections? It would be interesting to see how our like-minded friends and connections stack up against the top works per the Zeitgeist...I mean, my top 50 similar libraries don't manage to own enough copies of The DaVinci Code to crack the top 250 despite it being the #8 book logged overall...

Damn chick lit.
Carolyn Keene dominates both lists.
Pride and Prejudice drops from #1 shared (30) to #2 top.
Think how bad my top 50 would be if I added Jane Eyre which is their top at (33).

Seems to be working, similar to the home page, but with the raw - not the weighted numbers version.
1 request: can the titles be sorted on alphabet please (or on author)

Carolyn Keene is not chick lit. She is tweenybopper lit.

ETA: Actually she is way-back-when-I-was-a-kid, first-experience-with-series-lit.

Nice. Echoing others here, I'd prefer default to 50 similar (or 25 similar or whatever, though I imagine folks with designated friends would prefer them) or for my selection to stick, and I'd want the shared books by person to be collapsible, and for the top books that I do or don't have to stand out.

Thanks Tim. I've been collecting a large list of interesting libraries and I often wished I could do something more with them.

I'll echo the modification requests above, especially the option to filter the top books list to see only books not in my library. I know that's a little different from what others have requested, but it would be my preferred solution.

I also think it would be interesting to see the lists ranked by obscurity, not just absolute numbers. I'm impressed that 18 percent of all copies of The Middle Ground in LT are owned by my top 50 libraries.

50: especially the option to filter the top books list to see only books not in my library

Good idea.

Errors from 23 are now gone - thanks!

This is fun! (but it would be "funner" with green check marks ... always want green check marks)

i'm getting the

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /var/www/html/inc_shortcuts.php on line 857

message still. but, to look on the bright side, when the new legacy libraries compare went live, it crashed my whole system!

On my own statistics page, when I do "top 50 similar libraries" and top books, I get a:

Warning: extract(): First argument should be an array in /var/www/html/inc_textfunctions.php on line 536

Just above item number 161.

I've got an interesting feature/bug, a couple of members are being listed as "username/real name", one example would be heyokish / katie cooke. It happened on at least one other that I noticed.

I had some of those too; it looks like those are the ones who filled in the real name field on their profiles.

Cool feature! Thanks!

In the Top Books, I have two books that appear in 47 of my "50 most similar libraries" and several more around 45. Jodi Picoult, you've found your audience. :-)

yay! it works now.

and my highest count is 43 out of 50. naturally, it's a Harry Potter. after that it's A Wrinkle in Time, surprisingly, at 42/50.

Great!!! Thank you.

Nice feature!

Is "friends's and connections's" intended as a wind-up for all the people who posted in the catalog/catalogue thread, or just an accident with the "s" key?

Making the category default to "friends" is obviously a subtle way of persuading us that we should use the "friend" feature, something I haven't felt much need for up to now.

Looking at "top 50 similar libraries" and "Top books", if I click on the link saying "All 16,360 books", it seems to time out without any error message. Maybe it would be better to suppress that link if there are so many shared books? "Top 1000" gives a result quite quickly.

Comparison to Legacy Libraries isn't working... for example, it says I share no books with SamuelJohnsonLibrary, but when I go to that profile, we share 5 books.

Something strange has happened on the member compare page as well. LT now seems to think that half of my top fifty similar libraries share no books with me.

Hmm. Tim?

Also, when you get a sec (ha!), can you re-run the LL's Categorized (http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Legacy_Libraries%2C_Categorized) into the Legacy stats? Some of them seem to be missing.

Thanks!

Comparison to Legacy Libraries isn't working... for example, it says I share no books with SamuelJohnsonLibrary, but when I go to that profile, we share 5 books.

When I sign in as you, I see you share 5 works/6 books, with it correct in both places. It's only two hours after you posted, so the caches will be the same. Can you check to see if maybe this was a misunderstanding or misreading.

Something strange has happened on the member compare page as well. LT now seems to think that half of my top fifty similar libraries share no books with me.

Yeah. I see that. I'll look at it later.

64: Yes, that member compare section gone all wonky for me too. It was fine earlier today.

v

61, 64 > It is now working.

It should be working for everyone. There was a deeper problem, introduced with collections which was showing up sporadically as the cache died out.

Yes back to normal, thanks.

v

I love this new feature.

I've looked to see if this was mentioned somewhere, but couldn't find it, but I am extremely happy that when looking at someone elses library, there is now (or for some time) an OK sign when I share that book and a plus sign when I do not.

I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it ! ! ! !

An OK sign ? Do you mean a white check surrounded by green for books you share ?

Also I just noticed that on the profile of other's library's in the box on the right that lists a sample of the books you share with that person it says

Books You Share (SUB1)

What is the SUB1 and when did it show up ?

>71 FicusFan:
It should be the number of books you share (and it was until a few hours ago) - SUB1 is the place holder for it.
It showed up some time today - it's already reported in the Bugs Collectors forum

The (SUB1) is an escaped bit of code that has been reported on another thread.