Collections: Assignment User-interface

I've mocked up a sample user-interface for assigning collections to items.



This is a screen-shot from the Add Books page.

1. You can add any number of collections to an item. Collection assignment is not exclusionary.
2. You can also remove the item from any of the collections.
3. The order of assignment doesn't matter (though ordering of collections themselves for menus and lists will be possible)
4. You will be able to add your own collections that will show up in the menus.

Thoughts? Love it? Hate it? Meh?

I'd love it even if I had to send in my edits via passenger pigeon as long as it means Collections are coming.

Seriously, it looks fine to me. Reminds me of how one adds tags to feeds in Google Reader.

Well the way I think about it is adding a book to a collection not a collection to a book, but I can see where this would be much easier in that the collections should be a fairly short list while the books can be very long. So I will say I like it.

However I will make one request for thoughts on this, Could we be able to add books to a collection by tag as well? I have 1100 comics and I would love to separate them from the other books into their own collection but I REALLY don't want to have to go visit all 1100 to do this change.

My guess is that we'll allow collection assignments in Power Edit so you could do it that way.

well 11 vs. 1100 is much better, glad to hear it. Can't wait until parts start showing up.

It looks quite functional. Where would it appear on the Add Books page? Above the search box? Between the search box and the Recently Added box? Within the Recently Added box?

That looks perfect to me at least where the Add Books page is concerned.

You've kind of hinted that we can change collections after we've assigned them through PE, which is what my next question was going to be. Obviously, a lot of the "default" collections are somewhat status oriented. Books are going to be moving between wishlist and owned, currently reading and not. I think it's important that it be just as easy to switch collections after they're assigned.

Not head-over-heels in love, but it's consistent with the way things like that work elsewhere in the site, and makes perfect sense to me.

At least, I would be fine with it on the Edit Books pages, or as an option (like the current add tags one) in Add Books; if you're going to put it in the Recently Added frame it might get large enough to be annoying fairly quickly.

And add another vote for making sure we can power edit or link a tag to a collection.

Looks good, but personally I prefer multiple-select scroll forms instead of multiple individual pull-downs.

e.g.,

<SELECT NAME="collections" MULTIPLE SIZE=5>
<OPTION VALUE="All">All
<OPTION VALUE="owned">owned
<OPTION VALUE="home in boston">home in boston
<OPTION VALUE="storage in california">storage in california
<OPTION VALUE="wishlist">wishlist
<OPTION VALUE="previously owned">previously owned
<OPTION VALUE="daughter's books">daughter's books
</SELECT>

Also, we should probably have an "add to all" and "remove from all" button.

I could see using "remove from all" (when I get rid of a book and would rather never think of it again), but what's the functionality of "add to all"? I think it would be very rare that someone would have their collections set up such that a book could fit into every single category. It would be a relative waste of space.

10 > I am guessing that the collections are being attached to the book so if you delete a book from the catalog it will disappear from all the collections.

11> Duh, that's a good point. So I guess I don't see functionality for "remove from all" either. After all, if it's in your library, doesn't it have to belong to one or more collections?

I agree with the bafflement in #10 -- it seems like for most people some collections will be mutually exclusive. "Add to all" seems useless.

*cracks up at fleela* I feel the same way!

Have to agree with the confusion about "add to all" and "remove from all" Huh?

12: I don't nesseceraly think that's true.... Depending on what collections I have, there will probably be books in my catalogue that aren't in any collection, just like there are some that have no tags.

I don't see us having an "add to all" or "remove from all". As has been said some collections are mutually exclusive from others (if you have something in your wishlist then you don't have it in your library, etc.).

Remove from all could be useful in some extreme circumstances but I'm not sure it warrants the added complexity.

As for multi-selects....those aren't the most intuitive to use for the average user. If I were designing an interface for ME to use I might use them but we have to think of the masses.

>15 conceptDawg: As has been said some collections are mutually exclusive from others (if you have something in your wishlist then you don't have it in your library, etc.).

I've reviewed it but don't own a copy, and would like to own it.

I own a copy, but want a copy of a new or different edition.

I use my wishlist for things for other people, not for myself (okay, that one makes very little sense to me, but I've seen other people use the term that way).

>12 The_Kat_Cache:, only if you're counting "your library" as its own collection. I expect to use this for a few read books and a few wishlist books, but not at all for the great majority of my library.

Surely there's another category - owned, has been read but isn't currently being read. A lot of my books would fall into that one.

Right, but you get my meaning. We can't even BEGIN to know what kinds of things people are going to use collections for. Heck, people are probably cataloging their fishing lures on here somewhere. They'll probably be dealing with "Haven't fished with it yet" and "Caught a big 'un with it" collections.

The features we start with are going to be streamlined. I'm not saying we're never going to have the add/remove all just that we probably won't have it when we go live.

Oh...and you'll be able to call your collections whatever you want.

We'll have a few 'standing' collections but for the most part you are free to modify your collections however you see fit. They are also going to have flags on them so that you can exclude them from being in your library (the common wishlist or 'read but not owned' as examples) or from being included in recommendations, etc.

Chris, I hope I know the answer to this, but please say there's a way to set a default rather than having to go to the drop-downs every time a new book is added?

I also realize this is a thread for the Add Books UI, but power edit would be great.

The screenshot you are seeing above is from the left side of the Add Books page so if you set it to have 4 collections then every book you add will be assigned to those 4 collections.

As for having a "standing" default set of collections for every book you add on LT....I haven't thought about it but I don't think it would be a problem to have something like that.

>21 conceptDawg:, Either of those sounds fine, as long as there's no forced editing per book -- actually, knowing it's the left side is great; for some reason my very tired brain was picturing all that stuff squeezed into the quick edit space on each added book, which would be beyond horror.

(I suspect that some of the folks who seem to want collections to indicate read/unread status would like something set as a preference. I'm not sure I think of them that way, or even what the heck they're supposed to be, but hey, different strokes.)

Looks really nice!

Will collections be accessible through the APIs too?

17>

Surely there's another category - owned, has been read but isn't currently being read. A lot of my books would fall into that one.

Surely that's the subset of "Your library" that does not overlap with "Currently Reading".

It looks good - clear, simple, and - as melannen said - consistent with the way other features on the site work. It seems like a good way to make a complex and powerful feature easily accessible. I suppose there will be something like this on the Edit Books page too?

2. You can also remove the item from any of the collections.

Does this include the "All books" collection that's shown in Tim's catalogue view sample?

I'm with Fleela in #2.

It looks like a logical way to add books, especially like being able to order the collections and power edit to assign collections will be wonderful!

For standing collections which might cluster, would it make sense to have a some standing collection labels so that not all collections appear in all dropdowns? For instance (not necessarily pinning down categories, just the idea of the UI clustering for more powerful features later)

Ownership: (Owned, Formerly Owned, Borrowed, ) + users can add category here
Wishlist: (To Read, To Buy, To Have Others Buy, ) + users can add category here
Owner: (customized by user with household/family members, ) + either ability to multi-select here or use this heirarchy more than once
Privacy: (public, private)
Custom Collection: (all of these would be user-named collections) + multi-select/more than one
Your Library?: (include, exclude) --> I include this because people seem to have very different ideas about what should default to be "in" the Your Library view. This should default to include to save data entry.

Also, although unrelated, the shiny gray background on the dropdown doesn't present enough contrast for me, especially if I imagine the initial data entry of lots of books, when I remember how tired my eyes got as it was.

I'm excited to see this feature coming, though! Thanks for involving us in input before it goes live.

Honestly, this does not feel like right.

#9's suggestion of multiple selection isn't so hot for the reason you give in #15: every non-expert UI that uses them takes up space right next to the list telling the poor user to hold down the Ctrl key (which is probably something else on a Mac) to select more than one. (I've written that text myself a number of times.)

The mock-up suggests that you can select the same collection in more than one combo. Isn't that confusing? Would the real thing avoid this?

How about a list with checks?

I'm not sure (remove) and (more) are gonna be clear, either, because of potential confusion between affecting the UI, which is just a plan for which collections to add, and removing from some book someplace. Maybe I'm mistaken.

An alternative to that is a combo with "No collection" at the top initially selected and a script that always maintains exactly one of these. (That is, one more combo than there are collections selected.)

Having said all that, let me back up. In analyzing the common use case, what is the expected number of collections to be added? If the answer is exactly 1 for 80% of the users 80% of the time, then what you have might be just right. You pick the one collection. In the odd case where you want more (or fewer) than one, there is a way to get it. It may not be the most obvious or the most ergonomic, but you can learn it. And you don't waste space with a listbox (or whatever) of all the choices all the time.

MMcM, well thought out response. I agree with you pretty much 100% on every point you make. I've found that my life as a designer is more about compromise when it comes to a site that has half a million users. There are tons of cool UI things that I'd love to try here but in the end I think we go with the 80-90% rule and make it simple to use for that group of people.

We think (note stress there) that most books are going to be in one collection. Certainly there will be exceptions and certainly some people will have every one of their books in multiple collections. We are thinking those people will not be the norm. One thing we all have to remember is that all of us who tend to comment on these types of threads are "power users".

After Collections has been released and people have had a chance to start using it we can start to make subtle changes and improvements based on real-world interactions.

I think I prefer a list of all your collections with checkboxes on the left. What you've mocked up seems way more confusing.

#31

That could take up a lot of space, though, if someone has a lot of custom collections.

My ideal would actually be something like is currently used for library searches - there's a list with checkboxes, but most of the list is hidden unless you ask for it. For people who only use the default collections it wouldn't make much difference.

But I usually do most of that work in power edit after adding the books anyway, because I never remember to change the tags listed when I change which books I'm entering, so I probably wouldn't use it much if we had power edit.

And I do see Tim and Chris's point about how most people probably won't go overboard with collections like I'm planning to. (But then, how many people search libraries other than Amazon?)

I'm not sure I understand the meaning of having "Your Library" as a collection choice.

conceptDawg made the following two comments above:

As has been said some collections are mutually exclusive from others (if you have something in your wishlist then you don't have it in your library, etc.).

We'll have a few 'standing' collections but for the most part you are free to modify your collections however you see fit. They are also going to have flags on them so that you can exclude them from being in your library (the common wishlist or 'read but not owned' as examples) or from being included in recommendations, etc.

The former seems to me to say that "Your Library" will be a collection like all others, a subset of your book records, and will not contain the books in collections like wishlist unless you specifically select both collections when adding. The latter seems to say that "your library" will be the set of all of your LT book records, and that collections like wishlist will be removed with a collection flag. Those would seem to be mutually exclusive options. Perhaps I'm confused.

Assuming I'm not, I would prefer the latter, flagging option. In the end I hope to be able to remove some collections from my main library statistics, while leaving them in my main social calculations (read but not owned) or visa versa (my RPG guidebooks and children's books). I could do this under the first system, but I think I would have to create extra, rather artificial collections that would be used only with particular LT functions.

I know these comments move beyond the issue of the assignment UI, but I worry that if I don't understand the logic I may waste time organizing my collections in a way that won't quite work when additional features are added.

</i> (closing a rogue tag - oops, already done)

We need to explain what the "Your library" collection is proposed to be. I'll start another thread once I've gathered myself for it.

And somebody asked about the 'All books' collection that is in Tim's screenshot. That's a kind of "virtual" collection that you can't add items to. Basically it contains every item from every collection, regardless of whether or not it's in a wishlist, etc.

It's what your catalog is now with everything thrown together.

32> I think the idea of Collections is that there shouldn't be a lot of them. See Tim's design for the Your Library page which doesn't work well for a large number of Collections. I commented in that other thread about what makes Collections and tags different, and the numbers of them is a major difference.

38> Unless they specifically limit the number of custom collections a user can create, there WILL be people with unwieldy numbers. It's something to at least keep in mind while designing, I think.

Chris, I'm wavering on our idea about the "Your library" collection.

Basically, the idea is that "Your library" is a virtual or "smart" collection too. It includes everything that *isn't* part of a collection that excludes it. That is, each collection would have a checkbox that decides if it's part of "your library." By default, "wish list" books would not be in "your library," for example. But "currently reading" would be. You could, I think, exclude a book from "Your library." Anyway, it's sounding complex just talking about it, even if it accords with how I think most users will use collections.

I think the answer is that every collection is just like every other collection, with one exception—"All books." By default all members' books are going to be thrown into the "Your library" collection when collections debuts (excepting books tagged "wish list," etc. perhaps but there will be no permanent "tie" between the tag name and the collection), and "Your library" will be the default when adding books—unless you change it. But the system won't consider "Your library" as a super-collection in any way.

This is all rather abstract. I'm not sure we can really discuss it together before we have something "on the table" as it were. Chris and I have thought about this stuff rather too much.

Chris: I'm wavering on checkboxes too. What's your feeling on them? What if we showed four or five by default, with a (more) to see the full list?

>40 timspalding:

I'm inclined to set a maximum—100 for example. Some UI elements, like menus become impossible when you hundreds or thousands of options, and I'm even thinking I want to keep the collections number a "smallint" (0-255) in the database for storage reasons.

Your library could be used for the books literally owned, which is what I'm planning for inventory-type purposes. :)

39/40: I think if people want more than 100 collections, then they need to look into tags. :)

28: And that gets back into hierarchical tags or subcollections... like what I want to do with genre within my catalog, not by tag necessarily.

If instead of "All Books" you called it "EveryThing" would that make it less confusing?

Also, whatever it's called, if you go with something like the graphic on the other thread, would it make sense to put "All Books" to the left of "Collections" (with all the specific collections to the right of the word "collections," or in a drop-down, whatever the UI ends up being), making it clear that All Books is not itself a collection/sub-set? Or am I thinking about it wrong?

I see no reason to limit the collections other than for database storage. I think 255 should be more than enough collections for any sane person. I'm sure there are the insane among us however.

As for checkboxes vs menus. I think I lean on the side of menus for the sake of brevity of UI. But I'm just leaning. I haven't completely stepped over the line.

Personally I would love to have "smart" collections that are based on rules but I don't think that is something that isn't going to happen on the first iteration of Collections. Smart collections are THE power feature for me in iTunes, Mail, and Xcode, etc.

I see no reason to limit the collections other than for database storage. I think 255 should be more than enough collections for any sane person. I'm sure there are the insane among us however.

Well, UI design. Both menus and lists of checkboxes get ugly when you have hundreds of options. Tags work because the UI is a text box.

I also think there's a subtle "shepherding" involved. If you limit how many tags are shown on the sub-nav, limit the total number of collections and make the collections UI optimized for small numbers, you're sending the message that collections are not a good way to keep track of subjects or apply call numbers to books. Maybe there's another way, like, um, tags.

People will misuse collections, as we both know. (And yes, you can misuse a feature. People who paste lengthy reviews into the tag box are misusing the feature. They make neither themselves or others happy.) The trick is to minimize this as much as possible.

As for checkboxes vs menus. I think I lean on the side of menus for the sake of brevity of UI. But I'm just leaning. I haven't completely stepped over the line.

Yeah, I'm not that strong on either. I can see it both ways. I think we need to think about how books are moved between collections on the catalog, though. That might be the metaphor we use elsewhere.

Smart collections

Excellent idea for two months from now! :)

The general idea is OK, intiuitive enough for me :) But I would prefer a list of checkboxes (with one drop-down menu to add more collections) instead of a list of drop-down menus. Clearer, takes less space and is more consistent with choosing the library. Something like that:

| | Collection1 (remove)
|x| Collection2 (remove)
| | Collection3 (remove)
Add: |Collection4|v|

Wait, why do you need the "remove" if there are checkboxes?

To remove from displayed list - there may be collections that will not grow like for example "inherited books" so it would make sense to temporarily put the collection on the displayed list, add the bunch of books that you want to place there and then remove the collection from the visible list so it doesn't take space.

Menus might make sense on the add books page, but could we please have checkboxes on the edit books page? They feel a lot more comfortable to me, and there is more space available there.

I also think that if you have the drop down menus, each of them should also have a blank position. Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, I can't seem to figure out how these drop down menus are going to work.

Like 'remove' in the list of sources?

Sample UI: I like it and can see that it would work quite intuitively for me. That said, I'd probably get used to checkboxes too if that was the consensus - hard to say without actually playing around with it. I'm guessing that with your good record for taking on-board user feedback, once this debuts there'll be plenty of time to comment on issues so I would say, in the first instance, looks great.

Your Library: I like the idea of this remaining on an equal footing with the other collections. Obviously there's going to be a bit of work (and by 'work' I mean lovely hours spent diligently deciding which collections I want and where to put stuff) organising our standing libraries but from a personal perspective, I would prefer to manage my own 'My Library' tag as and when a book disappears. For example, I could envisage a situation where I would want certain books to appear both in my library and on my wishlist if I was 'wishing' for a different edition of a book I already own.

Just an aside, but basically I'm going to be so stoked when 'Collections' makes its official appearance that I'm sure I'll get used to whatever the consensus is.

It took me a while to understand how the UI was going to work (well, just reading through the comments - I'm sure actually using it would've been self-explanatory) and I really like it.

Without having used it yet, I think the drop-down menus are a better idea than checkboxes would be.

I also think the idea that you can choose to have a collection not be included in "Your Library" is fantastic. I'm don't know if it's a function I'll use, but I know how important keeping certain collections separate is to some people and that is a great solution.

Don't like it - particularly don't like the blue border. None of the colour font seems to match. Not sure I understand it either. Why is there a drop down and a list? What's the point of the up/down arrows?

I Add a book and currently have a search field and a tag field. Then once I've added the book if I need to there are few (generally for me useless)quick edit fields, or else I have to navigate away to a full edit.

At which stage do I choose collections? As part of the pre-search like tags? I would expect a similar sort of field, either free form or a checkbox list. Green would seem to be a better "you've selected this" than blue.

I'd just like to add a vote for checkboxes.

Perhaps you'd want to support allowing the user to specify the display order when creating a new collection? And perhaps the default number of collections to display?

I think the answer is that every collection is just like every other collection, with one exception—"All books."

What is the point of this? Why do we need an All Books collection that's somehow "special"? People would easily be able to create a collection that includes all books if they wanted to, but I think there are plenty of people who would consider it unnecessary. I don't need to see some meaningless mixture of my library and my wishlist--and, more importantly, if other people viewing my catalogue would see that meaningless mixture by default, it would lead me not to use the wishlist at all.

>52 reading_fox:

The color, font, border are all about the web browser Chris used to take the screenshot. Clearly you are using a different browser or a different operating system. Whatever your menus look like to you, it will look like those.

>53 paulhurtley:

Checkboxes or a menu, we're definitely going to allow changing the display order.

>54 _Zoe_:

Zoe. "All books" is there so that you can perform actions on all your books. For example, without an "all books" collection you couldn't change all instances of a tag, or search for a book you know is there somewhere, or perform any other editing or searching task without clicking one-by-one through all your collections. It also helps if a book isn't in any collection at all.

Look at iTunes. The top option is "music." The collections (playlists) are optional; you can always get at all your music with "music" if you want to. It's a very useful feature.

I was assuming that it would be Your Library that is shown as default. And it would also be the number of books in Your Library that determines the size of your library displayed on your profile?

"All books" is there so that you can perform actions on all your books. For example, without an "all books" collection you couldn't change all instances of a tag, or search for a book you know is there somewhere, or perform any other editing or searching task without clicking one-by-one through all your collections. It also helps if a book isn't in any collection at all.

I feel like this reduces collections to glorified tags. We can't actually separate anything out after all. We're encouraged to have so many collections that searching them individually would be a big deal. What's the difference supposed to be?

I think that the UI should be designed around about 8 Collections; more than that should be accommodated but it doesn't have to look perty. And I don't think a hard limit of 20 would be a bad idea either since more than that would make some UIs impossible.

I feel like this reduces collections to glorified tags. We can't actually separate anything out after all. We're encouraged to have so many collections that searching them individually would be a big deal. What's the difference supposed to be?

For me anyway, this wouldn't be the case. I would only have a limited number of collections but there would certainly be certain blanket tag edits that I would like a centralised 'All Books' option to do that would be carried across all collections. If I add a tag to a particular subset of books retrospectively, for example, and the book are spread across different collections. It would be very time-saving not to have to trawl each collection and make sure that they are all changed and not to duplicate the effort for books in more than one collection.

Sorry, that bounced a bit off-topic from the UI....

Yeah, for some books, all I know is they sound interesting, so I'm going to separate out "wishlist" (books I will obtain) from "bookmark" (books that might be good). From what Zoe has said now and earlier, she would be much happier if she could hide All Books from others' view to make that separation solid.

Zoe: If you were willing to separate your wishlist that type of way and you made it private, would that work for you? Or do you want to show it to people, but never have it show in All Books to other people?

Would it help if the All Books option were separated from the actual Collections somehow? Perhaps a thick bar or a different font?

>60 infiniteletters: And from my own view, too :)

62: How are you going to do mass-changes then?

>61 jjwilson61: I don't think that would make a difference.

>63 infiniteletters: I don't need mass changes. The whole point of collections for me is that they're different. I intend to have most books in My Library (including read but not owned, since I don't consider this difference significant enough to warrant a collection rather than tags, and since I want to view owned and read books together). Currently Reading (if I decide to use it) would be a subset of My Library, and I would make changes to those books via My Library. Wishlist would be entirely separate. I don't need to search Wishlist together with My Library, I don't need to make sure the tags are uniform, I don't need anything like that. I essentially want my two main collections to function like separate accounts, minus the hassle of signing in and out repeatedly.

1>

I must admit--I was confused at first what the "(remove)" was all about. I think I've figured it out by reading through the comments here, but I'm still not certain.

Personally, I'd favor check-boxes. Perhaps having a small set shown initially, and then a "(more)" link to show the rest. That's my vote, anyway. :-)

Hi! This looks absolutely super! This is what I was missing even though I after thourough research ended up with librarything as my system. So thanks! When will it be online?

But, is there any possibility that the user may be able to add sub-collections?

For instance, I have a lot of history books, and I would like to sub-catalouge them in to history-economic, history-political, history-swedish, history-modern an so on. That is, I would like to be able to search out all history books in one search, or choose a subcategory. Why? Because I have A LOT of books, and I don't always remember the title of the book I'm looking for, but can narrow it down to one or two subcategorys, and also, I have my homelibrary organised that way.

I hope this is readable, sorry about my poor english writing.

Here's my 2 cents, which is probably exactly what it's worth. ;)

I think that LT must have the ability to show and work with "all books" (or Your Library, or whatever it end up being called). In fact, if LT didn't keep this ability I would NOT use collections except as a way to keep track of my wishlist, and that would be very sad.

Not everyone is going to use the collections "wishlist", "read but not owned" or whatever. Personally, I will probably use genres for my collections, so to me it doesn't make sense not to have the ability to see and/or work with every single book in my LT account. I don't agree with the idea that if there is an "all books" choice that then collections would be "glorified tags." Not at all! It would finally mean that I can add one level of hierarchy, then use tags across all collections to slice and dice my library the way I want it. By adding just that one level of hierarchy, my library becomes much more workable and vibrant to me.

I like the checkbox idea. I use *cough* Goodreads for my wishlist, and their checkbox for "shelves" (the basic equivalent of LT's collections) is intuitive and easy to use.

Edited for a bit of clarity.

I think this is fine, and I would get used to it, but I would prefer checkboxes.

That said, I do 99% of my editing on the Edit Book page. All I do on the Add Books page is add the book. So, while this is not the subject of this thread, I will be interested in how I will be able to add a book to different collections from the Edit Book page.

Also, I find "All Books" or whatever it ends up being called confusing. Why not keep the terminology we are used to and have "Your Library" mean "everything you have listed on LT from soup to nuts?" Then come up with something else for the new "your library" concept, which I confess I don't completely understand.

>65 _Zoe_: Let's say I'm browsing recommendations for history, and as always, I find interesting books. Not only do I add them to my wishlist, I tag them as well. I think of tags and collections as being perpendicular to each other, and having the ability to "slice across" one with the other could be very handy.

* Really Truncated Example:

select tag: English Tudor history

Book | Collection(s)
The Age of Plunder -|- History
The Age of Plunder -|- Wishlist

By being able to see everything, I can find out that I've added a book to my Wishlist that's already in a box in my basement. You could never see that if there weren't a way to see everything at once.

* Drat - no tables in talk!

#67

Considering how long it has taken for Collections to reach this point I don't think you should hold on for sub-collections.

Looking at what you want to do then tags could do that extremely well. You can search for tags such as "history*" to get all history books or "history-swedish" just for Swedish history. Whether you use history as a collection or not would be your choice.

Rebecca in # 69 wrote, "Also, I find "All Books" or whatever it ends up being called confusing. Why not keep the terminology we are used to and have "Your Library" mean "everything you have listed on LT from soup to nuts?" Then come up with something else for the new "your library" concept, which I confess I don't completely understand."

Since I haven't seen anyone else respond to rsterling's suggestion in # 42, I like the idea of using "EveryThing" to indicate, as Rebecca said, "everything you have listed on LT from soup to nuts."

Or, if "EveryThing" sounds too much like ALL of LT, maybe "Your EveryThing" or "All Your Things"? Just thinking out loud.

As for the user interface, I don't have any strong negative feelings when looking at the screenshot in # 1. It looks like a good start and seems easy to figure out.

I haven't had as much time for LT this summer as I would have liked, but I was so excited to finally see some concrete progress toward Collections, I've already started thinking this is how I'll spend Labor Day! Please please please be done by Labor Day, and I'll be THRILLED!!!

Zoe, from what I am reading on this, the 'All books' feature would only be visible to you and obviously you don't need to use it, it might even be possible to (from other discussions) turn yours off in the future so you don't see it. What others would see is 'Your Library' and you could put what ever you want in there.

Making a software change to make it impossible to ever see 2 collections mixed is a lot of work for little gain when it can effectively be done by choosing not to use 1 specific link.

In my mind "Your Library" are the books that I own while "All Books" would incorporate all of the books in the various collections. Of course, everyone uses LibraryThing in a slightly different way. I expect the same will go for Collections, too.

I would definitely like to have the "All Books" option in addition to the "Your Library" option, especially because of how I do my combining/separating work. Of course, this whole discussion isn't completely relevant to the thread (sorry!) and probably is somewhat a moot point if Collections will be user specified, anyway.

>73 readafew: Where have you seen that "All books" would be visible only to me?

Making a software change to make it impossible to ever see 2 collections mixed

There's been no suggestion of letting us see any two collections together, which would probably be more useful. The options are all or one.

I think that LT must have the ability to show and work with "all books" (or Your Library, or whatever it end up being called).

So why can't users list all books in Your Library or whatever other name they want to give that collection? Nothing would prevent anyone from creating one collection that consisted of all the books and other collections that consisted of some of the books. Ideally there should even be ways to create "smart" collections based on set conditions, such as Books in Collection A and Books in Collection B and Books with Tag C. So if the collections interface is good, anyone who wants to should be able to create and maintain an All Books collection very easily. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to have such a collection. I'm saying that people shouldn't be forced to have such a collection, which is entirely different.

#67:

That's exactly the sort of situation that we're thinking of with "better served by using tags". As I see it, content-based distinctions -- history, poetry, science fiction -- are probably a use for tags, while the sort of distinctions that don't depend on what's between the covers -- wishlist, read-but-not-owned, yours/mine/ours for libraries belonging to a couple, currently reading -- are a use for collections.

#69:

Also, I find "All Books" or whatever it ends up being called confusing. Why not keep the terminology we are used to and have "Your Library" mean "everything you have listed on LT from soup to nuts?" Then come up with something else for the new "your library" concept, which I confess I don't completely understand.

Please no. I mean, really, please please please no.

My library does not include my wishlist. It does not include books I borrowed from the library or from friends. That's why I don't have them listed in my LT catalog and why I've been waiting for collections all this time -- so I can list them. Having the "Your library" collection include my wishlist and borrowed books would be utterly incomprehensible -- how would I designate my ACTUAL LIBRARY in that case? "My real library"? "My actual library"? "All books" is instantly understandable.

69> My understanding of the Your Library concept is that a lot of people think of the books you own as "their library" and, while they would like to keep track of a wishlist, for example, they think of those books as being in "their library" so it would be nice to make them distinct. Of course other people have different ideas of what books are in "their library" which is why Tim didn't just call it Owned Books or something which would have been more clear. It's a trade-off between clarity and flexibility.

My thinking is that "All Books" isn't actually a collection itself. It's the universe of books and collections.

well Zoe I can see what you're trying to say, but I don't understand your militant stance on this. In the database all your books ARE/WILL BE mixed up together, the tags and collections are just ways to slice them into different views. The All view is just looking at it with out the filters. So what this is, is not 'any extra group forced on you' but an extra thing made available for you. A tool for which you don't have any use for, so ignore it.

If you're only real argument is 'I don't want anyone to see these jumbled together' then you are forcing your view on others, and nowhere else is this the case in LT, only what they see, not how they see it.

#76, lorax, You make a good point. I hadn't thought of it like that (even though I've been holding out for my wishlist too). Having read your argument, I'm persuaded that my idea in #69 isn't a good one. In fact, I like HeathMochaFrost's idea in #72 about "Your EveryThing," more than "All Books" because people do have other things cataloged.

I see the All Books in the context of our county library system which when I search the CCPL online catalog I am searching the entire library of all books owned by the county in all its various locations. When the search results come in I see the total number of copies owned by the system but I also see them broken down by collection or where the books are located. So when I search for a title I don't search my local collection (brick and mortar library in my town) but the All Library collection. I wouldn't want to search each local collection for the title I am looking for. In the same way I may need to search my whole library if my poor old brain can't remember which collection I have assigned to a book.

#79 said " For myself, I would like the "All Books" to be my "everything", not just a collection which I named "All Books" and tried to add all my books into, and missed a few, or forgot to add that last batch of newly acquired books into."

That's how I think....

I am also imagining that when I use the LT mobile app I will be searching All Books. I'm not sure how far into collections it will reach but All Library would be a sure bet with maybe a collection designation as part of the search results?

I think that part of the problem here is that in the absence of a coherent way to treat various types of unowned/unread books, tow schools of users has developed. The first school used LT to list only their actual libraries (and a few austere types listed only books they had read) if these user wanted wishlist or other unowned booklist, they created separate accounts. For them the new collections system is a way to add these other booklists to their primary account without polluting the record of their real library. The logic here is adding new parallel sets of books.

The second school simply treated LT as a booklist, a place to record any book of interest regardless of ownership. They perhaps took the trouble to mark wishlist or other unowned books with tags. For the record, I am of this school. For these users collections offers the opportunity to mark unowned books in a more concrete way that better communicates their status to other users. I never really liked the fact that I seem to be claiming to have over 10,000 books on the zeitgeist page. But that was never enough for me to change a cataloging style I find useful. The logic here is creating and flagging subsets out of one general set.

(Then there are people who probably never even thought of adding a wishlist, see collections as a way to organize books by genre or the like, and find the whole argument bewildering.)

If the only issue was organizing lists, I could get used to either logic. The thing is, I can already make lists using tags. In my mind, collections was never about lists, but about giving me control over the statistics displayed about my library and over how my library interacted with the social calculations (like recommendations and users with your books).

To get what I want I would not have My Library as a collection, per se, rather each collection would have four optional flags controlling how it relates to my library:

1. Exclude from My Library catalog. Books in a collection with this flag would not appear in the default catalog view of My Library and would not display in a search of My Library. They could be viewed and searched by entering the particular collection. If the default search were only of My Library, an optional "Search all collections" search would be needed.

2. Exclude from My Library statistics. Books in a collection with this flag would not count toward the general statistics displayed for the user, not would they be included in the various clouds (which are really graphical displays of library statistics.) Statistics and clouds for a collection so flagged could be displayed by selecting that collection.

3. Exclude from My Library social data. Books in a collection with this flag would not count toward the default social calculations like recommendations and users with your books. Recommendations for the collection by itself could be viewed by selection the collection.

4. Make collection private. This flag would activate the above three functions, but only for guests, not of the owner of the account. In addition the name of the collection would be hidden from guests.

I think that if Zoe (to take an example) created a wishlist collection and checked all four flags, she would have what she wants. However, I could still have what I want, which is to leave everything in My Library (nothing flagged 1) but flag some collections with 2 (wishlist, read but not owned) and others with 3 (RPG guidebooks, children's books).

15: As for multi-selects....those aren't the most intuitive to use for the average user. If I were designing an interface for ME to use I might use them but we have to think of the masses.

Shouldn't we think of everyone? Add my vote for a list with checkboxes. Separate dropdowns are really really irritating, even for only two or three items.

67: For instance, I have a lot of history books, and I would like to sub-catalouge them in to history-economic, history-political, history-swedish, history-modern an so on.

And I have a lot of math and computer and science books... As noted by lorax #76, this a tagging issue. It has been discussed extensively elsewhere (with no conclusion as yet, but there seems to be a fair amount of interest). Search in Talk for "bundling" and "hierarchy"/"hierarchical".

I like All Books as well. Like PT (#74), I was thinking that My Library would be the books I physically own, and All Books would be my LT universe. I imagine I might have a number of books that wouldn't be in any collection more specific than that.

(edited for typos)

Another vote for checkboxes - the UI interface designed for multiple selections, which is understood at first glance by practically everyone who has used the internet for more than a day. Not to mention, it better displays which items are already selected (if the same UI is going to be used on the item edit page as well as the Add Book page, which I think id desirable).

I also think, if you don't want people to use collections instead of tags, then there should be a fairly small maximum number. 8, 12, 20, somewhere in there. If someone is trying to create more collections that that, they should probably be using tags - and there should be a note on the Edit Collections page to that effect.

In fact, I think there should be a note on the Create/Edit collections page that they were designed for information pertaining to the item, not to the work. Tags should be for anything that pertains to the entire work - topic, author, setting, character, tone, plot type, etc. Or possibly anything you want really fine-grained (those people who denote location by individual box or shelf, for instance).

I.E.:

item characteristics - wishlist, belongs to my husband, borrowed from library, DVD, damaged, to be read, in storage - COLLECTIONS

work characteristics: fantasy, Pern series, dragons, female author, YA, music, Robinton (character), harpers, female protagonist, runaway, survival, coming of age - TAGS

My impression is that All Books is everything from soup to nuts, while My Library is more like My Main Library, that is, everything that is not in one of the other collections. (Ignoring for the moment that a book can be in more than one collection.)

Am I interpreting this correctly?

I feel like this reduces collections to glorified tags. We can't actually separate anything out after all. We're encouraged to have so many collections that searching them individually would be a big deal. What's the difference supposed to be? ... I essentially want my two main collections to function like separate accounts, minus the hassle of signing in and out repeatedly.

I'm tempted to get into this deeply, but I'll be brief.

First, it needs to be underscored that "separation" is just a question of user-interface and perception. However many accounts you have, they too are fictions covering the reality here--that your books are sitting side-by-side in the database and in God-knows-what order on disk and in memory. What appears together and what can be searched together are fictions. The question is, are they useful fictions or not?

The difference between collections and tags are as follows:

1. You get some collections by default.
2. The default collections have semantics attached to them that is shared across users. "Wish list" is assumed to mean the same thing acrosss users and, in fact, will be translated on non-English sites.
3. The user interface favors the structure--for example, with checkboxes or menus, not free text, so you have to do something special to create a new collection. (By contrast, you create a new tag when you make a typo.)
4. The user interface enforces the structure by keeping you "in" a collection more strongly than you're "in" a tag. For example, if you're in the "Wish List," searches go against the "Wish List" exclusively.

I essentially want my two main collections to function like separate accounts, minus the hassle of signing in and out repeatedly.

Well, we've got a "hassle" in there. But who is to say what level of hassle feels enough? There are ways to search two libraries at once too. And signing in on LibraryThing is almost too easy.

More seriously do you see no situation in which you or others might want to search across collections or make a change across them? For example, many users have suggested that they'll use collections for discrete pieces of their physical libraries. (In my case that would be books in Portland, ME and books in Cambridge, MA.) Aren't there times when someone would want to remember where a book was? Good grief, with all the books I buy or are flung at me, I can sometimes forget what I own and what I want!

Zoe, from what I am reading on this, the 'All books' feature would only be visible to you and obviously you don't need to use it, it might even be possible to (from other discussions) turn yours off in the future so you don't see it. What others would see is 'Your Library' and you could put what ever you want in there.

I don't see why "All Books" needs to be only available to you. Barring private collections--contemplated but NOT likely to be released immediately--what is to be refusing to let users access it?

There's a case to be made that "All Books" should not be the first choice on the sub-nav bar. Maybe it should be on the far right. Debatable.

There's been no suggestion of letting us see any two collections together, which would probably be more useful. The options are all or one.

I'm sure that will arise. It's not going to start out with that, but I could see that down the road.

I'm saying that people shouldn't be forced to have such a collection, which is entirely different.

At some point, LibraryThing will have some "forced" user-interface elements and some optional ones. Maybe we'll make it possible to remove "All Books" from your list of collections. But at some point the lowest level of removal has to be for the users to avoid a feature. Ad absurdum we get the argument that LibraryThing should let users omit buttons for recommendations because the recommended books include heresy.

"Donut?" "No, and how dare you give me the option!"

Of course other people have different ideas of what books are in "their library" which is why Tim didn't just call it Owned Books or something which would have been more clear. It's a trade-off between clarity and flexibility.

Rigth. I'm choosing the word "Your Library" over "Owned Books" because not all users will want to make that distinction. *I*, for example, have never felt that LibraryThing was about what I owned, but about what was in my mental library--what made me me, whether I own it, read it at a library or lost it. I do draw a sharp distinction between this "library" and the books I *want*. So I'll be using the "Wish List" collection assiduously.

In fact, I think there should be a note on the Create/Edit collections page that they were designed for information pertaining to the item, not to the work.

Your system seems to be more than item/work, but subject/non-subject. I am not going to proscribe any such uses. I at least shall continue to use tags for "damaged," "borrowed from library," etc.

I had hope collections could be used socially on LT.
We (my husband and I) have a library together, some books belong to "us", but basicly there is "his collection" and "my collection". Those collections are very different and would, if separated, give different connections in LT (as in members with your books).

Ad absurdum we get the argument that LibraryThing should let users omit buttons for recommendations because the recommended books include heresy.

I'm not sure if it counts as a reductio ad absurdum if it's a request that actual users have made. Well, maybe it wasn't heresy per se, but I've seen "Recommendations include books I find morally reprehensible and I should be able to opt out of them" advanced as a serious suggestion.

And signing in on LibraryThing is almost too easy.

Almost....when one's not getting a 404 while trying to navigate between accounts.

> 90 Tim:
"Donut?" "No, and how dare you give me the option!"

Is it wrong that I find that incredibly funny? Only an hour left at work, and my gosh, I just can't stop laughing at this!

I had hope collections could be used socially on LT.

I'm open to the idea of showing your connections FROM one one your collections—although I'm very worried about the extra processing overhead. But we won't be showing connections INTO your collections. That is, I don't want users' "Similar Libraries" to be subdividing by collections. That would get very confusing.

But at some point the lowest level of removal has to be for the users to avoid a feature.

Given that this is a pretty major feature that hasn't even been released yet, I think it's far too early to go this route. Obviously I could just avoid collections and keep my wishlist on amazon, but that's not really the ideal outcome.

More seriously do you see no situation in which you or others might want to search across collections or make a change across them?

Again, I'm not saying anything about others. I'd be happy if All Books existed as a default but could be deleted.

Much better would be if we could search across multiple collections without creating a collection containing those collections. Someone is just as likely to want to search just their Portland books and their Cambridge books, excluding their wishlist and read-but-not-owned collections, as they are to want to search all of them together. Is the solution to have Portland, Cambridge, Portland+Cambridge, Portland+Cambridge+read but not owned, read but not owned, wishlist, and All Books as 7 separate collections to handle the different searches you want to do on your 4 existing collections? I really hope not.

First, it needs to be underscored that "separation" is just a question of user-interface and perception.

Yes, I'm aware of that. But having a prominent link that says "click here to see all books" is a lot different from having all the books in the database together. The difference is that people will actually see the books shown together by the link, while they won't see the books sitting together in the database.

>83 eromsted: Thank you. That's exactly what I'd like.

If you're only real argument is 'I don't want anyone to see these jumbled together' then you are forcing your view on others, and nowhere else is this the case in LT, only what they see, not how they see it.

This is only true to a certain extent. When we choose to use the tags feature, we don't get a few extra tags added that we didn't want. When we choose to use LT to catalogue our books, we don't have ten default books in our catalogue that we can't get rid of.

LT doesn't change our catalogue views to match the other users', but I don't think their reasons for not doing that are really applicable here. Constantly forcing us to switch our views would be jarring and annoying; showing My Library to someone who wants to look at my books would be... exactly the same as it is now. I don't think a desire to prevent the user from presenting the books the way they wanted to was a key factor in the catalogue views decision.

Ok....If we don't get back on subject I'm going to TURN THIS BUS AROUND, MISTER!

So there have been two different styles of UI mentioned as the favorites in this thread: 1) menus, like the sample; 2) checkboxes.

I'm going to show you two images and I want you to think about all of the places where you might be able to assign books to collections:
Add books (left side, before you add the book),
Add books (right side, in the quick edit area of each book),
your catalog (possibly as an editable column)
the edit book page.

Tell me which UI works better for you. Note that with checkboxes ALL of your collections are shown even if you only have 1 collection assigned to the book. In my mind, that's the major drawback with that style. I prefer the more concise menu option but not enough to argue about it.

And we could possibly use both designs for different situations but I would like to avoid that.

---

Like you, prefer the drop down, but in the end, either will work for me.

97>

I prefer the check-boxes. I like being able to see all of my options.

Of course, I could learn to live with it either way.

Personally I would like the check boxes on the Edit book page, the other locations I would expect the drop down to work better because of space constraints. I also do almost all my book editing in the edit page anyway. (which reminds me, the tags box is still a 1 line input not a textarea will it be switched back?)

Checkboxes.

I admit, they would be sub-optimal in the Add Books quick edit area because of the space issue, but great everywhere else. And if there were a limited number available (um, and a limited length of label), you could divide them between two columns to compress the space occupied.

I'm with fleela .... like the drop down better (for exactly the reason that it's more concise) but it wouldn't ruin my LT experience if it was checkboxes. I could get used to that without much trouble. If the 'checkbox' fraternity was particularly militant, I wouldn't worry about it if it was majorly important to some people.

The one place where I would be a bit more vociferous in objections to checkboxes would be in the actual 'Library' view. Assuming we will have an 'All Books' collection (and not wishing to reopen the off-topic argument about that one .... can-opener, metal cylindrical object full of worms ..... argh!...must not open!), and that eventually there will be a column where we can edit collection membership (much like 'Tags' etc. now) for each book, then I wouldn't like it to be via checkboxes.

In general I want to see all the options and in my world there shouldn't be more than 5 or 6 of them so I want checkboxes, unless there really isn't the space. Are you sure you want to add it to the right side of the Add Books page? If so, I suggest making it a drop-down there and limiting it to only being able to add it to one Collection. If they want more they need to open the Edit page.

As far as having it in the catalog, having it as a column seems a little odd since you're already viewing it by Collection (except for the All Books one). If we want to change a books Collection from the catalog page, how about the action of dragging the book to the Collection name in the sub-nav bar? That to me seems more natural and easier than choosing from a drop-down menu. (I know that you don't do dragging anywhere else on the site, but you also don't have drop-down selectors within columns of the catalog either).

99> I like seeing all of my options too
I like and would use check boxes on the add books page on the left hand side more than I would in the quick edit. Seeing it there on the left would remind me to do it.
A drop down would work better on the edit page which already seem to me to be crowded but either is fine.
An editable column in catalog view? like the Series column?...wow that would be great. Any series entries I make are done right there in that column.
I find it incredibly useful to edit in catalog view (it would be perfect if the plus sign would stick in the tag box)...I would tend to use the add to collection there or on the add books page instead of trying to load my edit page.

I'm more or less with readafew (#100). I would really like checkboxes on the Edit book page because that's where I too do 99% of my editing. I would prefer them in the other places too, but I also recognize the space constraints.

Maybe this only reveals my ignorance about programming, but couldn't space be waved with checkboxes by listing them horizontally, not just vertically?

I don't understand the "I want to see all the options". If you click on the drop-down box, you'll see all the options right there.

Checkboxes would be great for four or five collections, but there are going to be people with who-knows-how-many times that. I'm for the drop-down menus.

But if you want more than one Collection you have to pull down the first one and select the first Collection. Then you have to pull down the second pull-down and select the second Collection. etc. Much simpler and quicker to just go click, click, click down the list.

Ok...here's a middle-ground option.
Checkboxes, but it shows only the collections that an items is in, unless it is in no collections.



I haven't decided whether to show the entire list if the item is not yet in any collections or show some sub-set of the list. I'd like to default to your most-used collections but I'm not sure we can do that in an efficient manner. Probably, but I don't want to commit to it quite yet.

Wasn't the originally proposed UI multiple dropdowns (once an item is selected in one dropdown, another dropdown appears or has to be requested)? A single dropdown with checkboxes would be fine.

If it's an either/or choice, then I vote for checkboxes. I'd prefer:

Add Books (left side between Search and Tags): list with checkboxes
Add Books quick edit (above Tags): list with checkboxes
Edit Books (above Tags): list with checkboxes
Catalog (editable column):comma-separated list for display, list with checkboxes for editing (what happens if the currently displayed collection is deselected from the list?)
and... Power Edit?

I think you are saying that all the checkboxes would show in edit books when first adding a book. That's what I really care about.

I don't use the left side of add books to add tags, because I'd rather wait until I know I can really find them, and don't have to enter manually. The same will be true with collections.

I don't see the point of the 108 graphic at all.

I think it needs to be either or for consistency's sake. Power users will want both, but consistency is a powerful thing.

>111 infiniteletters:

How so?

111 > it is for display purposes such as the catalog. (I think)

Checkboxes, IF the unused ones are not showing by default. In fact, everywhere I'd like to see only collections that I have something in (no empty Wishlist, empty Currently Reading etc.)

114: Oh, for display. Yeah, that's fine for display in the catalog, as long as it's "Change collections".

I like checkboxes, but they could quickly get unwieldy for large numbers. Maybe checkboxes for small numbers and then an automatic switch to menus for big numbers?

(responding as I go, so if I mention something already dealt with, bear with me)

Really, I have to agree with zoe here (msg. 54 on)... I had the impressions collections were going to *seperate* my library. My "wishlist collection" would be seperate from the others and would not be grouped with other books. Same for "library collection". If they can/will all be grouped together in "All books", what is the point? It's just like tags.

However! What I haven't seen mentioned/addressed yet is the level of inclusion of all of these collections. IF my "wishlist collection" can be seperated from things like total number of books, recommendations, etc, that would be a different story. ..... Maybe there could be an option to NOT include certain collections in the "all books"?

I'm sorry, but having my wishlisted books in a completely seperate collection was THE best thing about future-collections for me. If they are still going to be mashed with all the other books, what is the point??

83: *agree!!!* YES!! Those optional flags would be perfect. Wonderful. Awesome.

..... And now more on-topic: 97: Definitely prefer the checkboxes. Easier to see at a glance, less likely to break/not work (my computer seems to have problems with pull-down menus sometimes).

>97 conceptDawg: I'm not sure how the drop down would actually work. What happens when you click on it?

I like cD's solution in #108; it seems a workable middle ground. I agree with readafew in #100.

Add Books (left side between Search and Tags): pull-down menu; I have a huge number of sources in my list, and pushing that further down would be a drag.
Add Books quick edit (above Tags): pull-down menu, for space reasons.
Edit Books (below Tags): list with checkboxes; it would be nice if this was in two columns where there are many (more than 3) collections, though I don't plan to have a lot :-)
Catalog (editable column): comma-separated list for display, list with checkboxes for editing

117>

I think the idea is that you can get recommendations, totals, etc. for ANY collection. So you can have the "Your Library" collection, which is what it is now, and ALSO the "Wishlist" collection, but get recs just for "My library".

It's not "mashed in" unless you choose to look at the "All books" collection.

>117 Heather19:

Is there no time you'd like to search across collections, or make changes across collections? For example, you have a tag "my own cover." Aren't there times you'd want to see all your covers, rather than having to go collection by collection?

I'm just bewildered by the idea that if LibraryThing doesn't absolutely prevent you from working across collections, they're not collections.

On the functionality issues, I have to underscore that we'll have to take those bit by by and one by one over time. I think recommendations should be separable by collection. But collections will not debut with these separations all decided or implemented.

So... not sure I'm following this... are the items in collections--including wishlist--going to be counted in total library book count, and other stats?

Tim:

That is, I don't want users' "Similar Libraries" to be subdividing by collections. That would get very confusing.

But can we exclude some collections from stats for good? Like, obviously, the wishlist?

121 > I am also at a loss for how to explain the point behind this. Perspective I guess, I don't think of the 'All Books' as a collection it is just a way to look at the whole PILE of stuff in one place. I think most people will understand it better when it is available to play with.

Tim or Chris - I'm sorry if I missed this somewhere in the whole discussion, but one question: Will other users be able to see my collections, or will they only see the overarching collection you've been calling "All Books," which is basically whatever is in my catalog right now?

I 'think' the default for viewing others will be the 'Your Library' but the other collections will be visible unless you mark the collection private. That is what I have gleaned so far.

123> Exactly, All Books is a way to look at your library without Collections. It shouldn't be, and I don't think it is intended to be, the default view when someone looks at your library.

121/123: I think it's like the library purity debates. Zoe and Heather don't like having books that they don't have (or don't know that they'll definitely like) shown in a group with stuff they have. My interpretation only, Zoe, Heather, please correct me if I'm wrong.

I think I like #1 drop-downs, but if the collections feature turns out to be incredibly powerful, I'd change my mind and vote for checkboxes. How's that for fence-straddling?

127>

But that's where I get confused. I'm a fairly strong library purist (no wishlist, no read-but-not-owned, and of course nothing that isn't a book; the only place I waver is in entering books that I've ordered but haven't arrived yet), and I'm thrilled about collections. Having an overarching "set of all collections" doesn't bother me at all -- I don't have to look at it. I don't see why its existence is such a deal-breaker. Or, rather, I can see why people might not be happy with it, but the "what's the point" seems like gross hyperbole.

But can we exclude some collections from stats for good? Like, obviously, the wishlist?

Yes. I think that's necessary.

Argh. I lost a bunch of comments from not closing a tag right. More later.

121: Well, naturally, tags are different from collections. of course I'd want to see all covers sometimes instead of just "my own covers".

I'll give you a concrete example, maybe that will help better: My Nancy Drew books. I have TONS in my library. I also have more then a few tagged "To Be Read" or "wishlist". I have, so far, simply not put a "Nancy Drew" tag on those ones, because I don't like tagging books with catagories and stuff until I actually read them. THOSE Nancy Drew books are, in my mind, not truly mine yet, because I haven't read them and/or don't own them.
I would LOVE to have a "Nancy Drew" collection that could house all of MY Nancy Drew books, but leave out the ones in my catalogue that I haven't read or don't own yet. I can have that with the collections you are talking about, BUT if I go to "all books" and, say, sort by author, there they will be all together again.

127: Oh wow, I've never thought of myself as a library purist! lol I guess that's how it can be explained, tho. It's what I thought Collections would do, so now I'm getting frustrated that it turns out it won't do it.

125 and 126 seem to be thinking seperate things here. So Chris, Tim? Which is it? Will "Your Library" ("all books", whatever it's called) be default view for others, or what?

*sigh* As usual, I'm frustrated because I had this big notion of how Collections was going to work (I'm sure most people had certain notions), and I'm frustrated that it's not like that. But I'll deal. Always will.

And Tim, when Collections goes live, expect some extra cash coming your way! :)

edited to add: So what will be the final number of books in our catalogue? Based on "all books", or what?

131>

So what were you dreaming of from collections that this wouldn't provide? The inability to ever see all your books in one place, no matter how hard you tried?

132: Sounds pretty stupid when you put it that way. lol But as I said, to me those certain books *aren't* mine. If "all books" could disclude (is that a word?) a certain collection, like wishlist.... I have so many books that are in my catalogue that aren't *mine* in that sense, and I'd like to keep them seperate from books that I do see as "mine".

Heather, thank you! I was beginning to think I was crazy.

Perspective I guess, I don't think of the 'All Books' as a collection it is just a way to look at the whole PILE of stuff in one place.

It's the functionality that I'm concerned about, not the definition. I don't want to have all the stuff in one place, regardless of whether you call it a pile or a collection.

I think it's like the library purity debates. Zoe and Heather don't like having books that they don't have (or don't know that they'll definitely like) shown in a group with stuff they have.

Yeah, that's basically it. And for the record, I don't even consider myself a purist. My library currently includes books that I've read but don't own along with the books that I own and may or may not have read. There are even a few books in there that I don't own and have only started, not finished.

Is there no time you'd like to search across collections, or make changes across collections? For example, you have a tag "my own cover." Aren't there times you'd want to see all your covers, rather than having to go collection by collection?

To repeat what I've said before, I think the searching issue is more complicated than this. Creating a meaningless meta-collection so that you can search everything doesn't help with the issue of searching just two or three collections at once. It may be easiest, but it's far from best.

And I can't speak for Heather, but I certainly wouldn't bother adding custom covers to wishlist books.

It's not "mashed in" unless you choose to look at the "All books" collection.

Or someone else chooses to look at your All Books collection.

>131 Heather19:, 132

It will allow you to set aside the books you own from the books you don't own. You can be as puristic as you like.

It will ALSO allow you—if you want to, and hey, you don't have to; whatever floats your boat!—see those books together. Conceivably, some people will sometimes want to do this.

Help!

Rather than fighting you guys, let's see how the other half feels. That is, unless I hear otherwise, from now on, if you put something in a collection you cannot under any circumstance see it or search for it outside of the collection. Collections will be utterly discrete and non-mixable. We will be imposing a "waiting period" when you want to switch viewing collections, to reinforce this separation, and will also forbid books, once assigned to a collection, from moving.

135: You are joking there, right?
*hates how internet mangles tones*

I'm a fairly strong library purist (no wishlist, no read-but-not-owned, and of course nothing that isn't a book; the only place I waver is in entering books that I've ordered but haven't arrived yet), and I'm thrilled about collections....the "what's the point" seems like gross hyperbole.

I think it's exactly because you're a strong purist that the "what's the point" doesn't make sense to you. I already have my read-but-not-owned books in my library, since I sometimes want to see them with the rest of my books. If there's a chance that I'll want to see the books together sometime, they're already there. Tags are sufficient to let me see the books sometimes together and sometimes apart. The books that aren't in my catalogue yet are the ones that I absolutely never, ever want to see together with the others--namely, the wishlist books. If collections worked the way I wanted them to, I might actually have two wishlists: one for books that I definitely want to buy (not very many, since I tend to buy inexpensive books when I want them) and one for books that just looked interesting as I was browsing the site. I obviously have an extremely tenuous connection to the latter, so yes, the possibility of seeing them together with the rest is enough that I wouldn't use the feature for this purpose.

So what were you dreaming of from collections that this wouldn't provide? The inability to ever see all your books in one place, no matter how hard you tried?

Exactly.

Given the choice between multiple drop-downs and checkboxes, I vote for the boxes. They're quicker to fill in, and they help new users (who haven't been obsessing about collections for years) to know exactly what a collection is supposed to be in the first place. Visibility->The more users the feature has, the more useful the data will be. Plus, showing the default collections at first glance (instead of with pull-downs) makes it less likely we'll have to keep answering the wishlist/unowned/etc. questions in Talk, because the answers will be on the screen instead of hidden in a drop-down. I also think that making each collection take up screen space makes people less likely to misuse lots of collections instead of tags.

I don't want to have all the stuff in one place, regardless of whether you call it a pile or a collection.

And I do, except when I'm choosing to look at some specific collection, which I foresee being occasionally useful, but just a tiny minority of the time.

I do get that you don't want to look at things that way. It frankly gets my back up if someone doesn't want to allow the same range of choices.

Or someone else chooses to look at your All Books collection.

But they will. I will. Just to be contrary. And more seriously, they'll look at all books, and specific collections, and search results, and books in common, and tags (yes, across collections), and -- I dearly hope -- all kinds of feeds and widgets we haven't seen yet.

For some of us, the entire point of LT is that the whole network of information is so much greater than any one member's desire to say "you can only look through this particular lens".

>135 timspalding: You mean, rather than fight you guys, let's mock you? Let's intentionally misconstrue your idea so that it sounds stupid and we don't have to worry about formulating a serious response?

Brilliant.

It frankly gets my back up if someone doesn't want to allow the same range of choices.

Frankly, it gets my back up that YOU want to control MY library. I somehow doubt that it would do you great personal harm if I could delete my All Books collection.

For some of us, the entire point of LT is that the whole network of information is so much greater than any one member's desire to say "you can only look through this particular lens".

Some of us have a broader view about how to achieve this network of information. Think about it. Is the network better if I enter my wishlist but delete the All Books collection, or if I'm not allowed to delete the All Books collection and therefore don't enter any wishlist books?

Do you think we should force all the private libraries to go public, too?

Decision: I don't want members to start fighting with each other. That's happened before. I really don't want it to happen again.

So I'm just going to announce the decision* here, once which, frankly, will not change.

The decision is that, while collections will "separate" books in important ways, it will be possible to see your books "all mixed up" together if you want.

This "All Books" option/pseudo-collection will probably not be the left-most option, and certainly not the default option, but it will be available to users who want to do it. Depending on how the collection-editing goes, we may allow users to hide this option for themselves and others, but it's not a high priority for the first release. There are solid reasons why you build a product to work in the default way first, before you start letting people change core functionality.

So, in brief, collections will be available as a powerful way to order your books, even the default way. They will not be a mandatory or exclusive way, even when you want to work across them.

None of this has any bearing on just what features will be separable by collection and which won't. Frankly, collections is a big hunk of code. For both practical and member-feedback reasons, we never design and release everything at one; we work step-by-step. So, we're not going to decide everything now. But this issue, at least, is decided.

*Chris, Abby, Casey and Sonya are on board too.

Incidentally, I'm sorry for the sarcasm. Tone, as Heather noted, is hard on the web. Sonya should do all the talking here. She's so much more upbeat than me and would never get sarcastic about such a thing.

140>

I don't think that was his intention.

Rather, I think it was to humorously say "let's see how to get people who will occasionally want to see everything they have entered into LT in one place as angry about the implementation of collections as the idea that you can sometimes be able to see everything you have entered into LT makes Zoe and Heather." i.e. that no implementation will give everyone everything they wanted out of collections.

#135
A vote for flexibility; I can definitely see times I would want to see everything at once, and also times I would want to look only at a sub-set.

And I know that you're teasing, about not being able to move a book from one collection to another. :-)

Oh, for heaven's sake, Zoe. I never mentioned anything about private libraries. Everything I said was directed at the point of flexible ways of viewing those libraries that people choose to enter in public ways -- and in the same kinds of ways that we've always been able to do. Sometimes that means viewing a collection, sometimes it means a full library.

eta: this cross-posted with Tim and the following messages. I'd rather not turn a debate on how we access libraries into anything more personal.

142 Tim

Thank you.

No thanks necessary. I don't often come in with such big boots*, and it may well offend some. But decisions have to made eventually, and I knew I wasn't going to change my mind. And members fighting is bad. (I was not myself entirely blameless there).

*The last time was the tags tab. I eventually reversed myself there. I don't see that this time.

#95 tim
I'm open to the idea of showing your connections FROM one one your collections
That would be enough to please me

I personally like the drop down option on the LEFT side of add books near the tags box. But I would use other versions and once I had been using them for a while they would feel fine.

I'd prefer the drop-down menus rather than checkboxes. I expect that for me, and perhaps also many other people, most books will normally be in only one collection most of the time, maybe occasionally two - and the interface is crowded enough already. But it looks like a lot of people will be using it differently, as it seems the majority so far prefer the checkboxes. I'd be happy with either, really, especially on the Edit Books page where it doesn't really matter much if it makes me do a bit more scrolling.

Okay, I'll step out of this discussion for now and hope that eventually you do add the opt-out. As it stands, for me personally, Collections don't really offer much more than tags, so I'll be unlikely to use them. The possible exception is Currently Reading.

But one quick response first:

Everything I said was directed at the point of flexible ways of viewing those libraries that people choose to enter in public ways -- and in the same kinds of ways that we've always been able to do. Sometimes that means viewing a collection, sometimes it means a full library.

No, there have never been collections before, so there's no current feature that sometimes involves viewing a collection and sometimes involves viewing a full library. I addressed the issue of display styles in an earlier post.

I think the problem here is that it's not clear what people will see when they look at your catalog and what will be used in statistics and such. Will it be:

1. All Books
2. Your Library (a default collection including only those books you choose)
3. Any collection(s) you designate

I suspect, from what's been said about flags and such, that it would be #3, but I could also see #2. I don't think it's #1, which is what I think might be ruffling a few feathers. So, what is it?

I can go either way with checkboxes or drop-downs. My only personal preference is that there be a limit to what's visible at once. In my mind collections won't be my all-consuming time sink on LT, so I don't need to see all of the collections I'd make at once when I get around to entering those last few boxes of books.

I swear I'm entering those boxes one day...really.

Unless you have a magical, "What we think may be in the boxes you haven't entered" collection that will be automatically populated with the books that are in said boxes...

;-)

I vote for checkboxes with the possibility to expand the list (as in 108). I'm assuming we're still talking about the add books page(?).

I don't see why "All Books" needs to be only available to you. Barring private collections--contemplated but NOT likely to be released immediately--what is to be refusing to let users access it?

Really, privacy won't be built in from the beginning? I have to say, I'm not likely to use collections until it's possible to make them private. The main use I had forseen for them was to create private wishlists and books read lists (along with some books I collected as a child that I don't necessarily see the need to display publicly) - which I might share at some point, but didn't want public initially. And my impression was that this was one of the key features users wanted, along with the possibility to separate them from the overall public statistics. Similarly, I'd assumed there would be options to decide what external users get to see (whether they'd be able to see all your collections or not, and that would extend to your "all books," if some of your collections weren't private) and whether the counts of particular collections were included in the public numbers others see on your profile. So my excitement about Collections has been tempered. I guess I'll wait and see, but if it's all public by default, I just can't see using them much.

Checkboxes, definitely.

I would find them useful in all the same places as tag editing options, but especially in quick edit.

Some responses to some slightly off-topic ideas already in this thread:

>83 eromsted:: I am with you that stats are more important than lists. I like your ideas for customisable collections options.
I am also quite happy with the idea of stats/links coming from but not to individual collections. (Presumably they'd point toward other users' "My Library"s?)

"My Library" collections do need to be able to be true meta-collections in that they contain a set of other collections, and change their contents as those component collections do. (Is this what "smart collections" means?)

I'd be disappointed if there wasn't an option for other customisable meta-collections. In particular, I'd like one for "Our Physical Shelves."

I think in the end I will probably delete "All Books" if given the option, but in the meantime it will be a usefull stopgap if we can't search a specifically designated set of collections without creating a meta-collection to contain them.

It is very exciting that collections are on the way!

#142 Yay Tim!

#108 Graphic If there have to be checkboxes, I would vote for this option (unless the checkbox militia is entirely unwilling to compromise!) - for those of us who preferred dropdowns for conciseness, the compromise option of only initially seeing boxes that have been checked would work almost as well, for those that want the boxes to be visible for all collections, that's only one extra click away with 'Show More' ..... surely they'd give us a click for the sake of being neighbourly ;)

156>surely they'd give us a click for the sake of being neighbourly

I know I would! :-)

This is actually how I envisioned the check-boxes working best. To me it's much more intuitive than multiple drop-downs, and space is saved by collapsing it down. I'm assuming that clicking "more" would show all other available options? I definitely approve of this design.

Checkboxes vs. drop down - does it need to be either/or? Personally, I'd like to see the checkboxes inside a drop-down.

drop down

154 > I think that Tim did say you can make a private collection. he was referring to not hiding any collection from others that you haven't expressly set to hide.

Personally, I'd like to see the checkboxes inside a drop-down.

I don't see the point of mixing distinct, meaningful UI elements. Another book site does radio buttons in a menu—one exclusive selector within another, even though, in other contexts you can add a second collection—forbidden by check boxes. Weird.

I have to say, opinion here is not in disagreement with Chris and me—uncertain. I think we're going to go live with checkboxes, but it's not something we feel very strongly about.

>161 timspalding:
I'm almost positive they were joking. Almost.

161> Just think of it as a more intuitive way to do a multi-choice drop-down list. That is without having to know to do control-clicks.

The more I think about it the more sure I am that a multi-choice drop-down list is the correct UI element for this situation. If people don't know how to use it we'll have to teach them. Can we consider putting a book into more than one Collection at a time a power-user feature anyway?

Multi-choice drop-downs are the lepers of the UI world. There's no way I'd use one.

Convince Amazon, Yahoo Google to use them everywhere, wait a year and ask me again.

>165 timspalding:
Google Reader uses them frequently.

>166 DaynaRT:

What? Where? I can't find them if they do.

>167 twomoredays:
Add a new feed and you'll see one at the top that lets you assign multiple tags with checkmarks. Same thing on the subscriptions tab under settings.

>169 DaynaRT:

Okay, now I see what you're talking about. But I didn't think that's what Tim was talking about. You can still only select one thing at a time from the drop box.

I thought Tim was referring to being able to select multiple items from one drop down.

Having multiple drop-downs seems messy. I always get confused as to which option I've chosen in which drop-down (even when I'm selecting Principal, Secondary, and Original languages on the edit book page, I have to double- or triple-check.)
My feeling is that if books are going to need more than one drop down on a regular basis, I'd prefer the checkboxes (even though they take up so much space.)
I'm trying to judge how likely I am to have books in more than one collection...at first I assumed my collections would be mutually exclusive, but with "Your Library" and "To Read" both as options, I think it's fairly inevitable that many books will end up in at least two collections.

108 looks good. In an ideal, overly customized world, I'd want it to default to my most popular collections plus whatever collections the book is in, but that seems rather complicated. I'd want My Library, Wishlist, and maybe Unowned on there as standing options, since I imagine an incoming book would almost have to be in one of those. To Read seems logical too, since a recently acquired book would likely be in that collection. Finally, if Currently Reading is not self-populating, I'd definitely want it to be there at the top of the list for ease of use. Otherwise, it's just too much bother, especially for those of us who read through things quickly.

That would leave as the default subset (assuming the book is in no collections):
Add To Collections
[ ] Currently Reading
[ ] Your Library
[ ] Wish List
[ ] Unowned
[ ] To Read
(more)

And, if the book is in collections already:
Add To Collections
[ ] Currently Reading
[√] Your Library
[√] From John
(more)

I like monarchi's suggestion. It seems functional for both the minimalist and the maximalist.

Yes, 171 sounds good.

As long as those of us who have no intention of using 'Currently reading' have the option of getting rid of it. I think always seeing it there on top of the list would drive me crazy. At the bottom of the list wouldn't be as bad.

>174 MarthaJeanne: I think Tim or Chris mentioned (maybe in the 'Collections Defaults" thread) that we would be able to eliminate whichever of the standard collections we didn't want, as well as being able to add our own. I certainly hope so, although I think they've done a great job of creating a set of defaults that will work reasonably well for most users:)

Yes, you'll be able to disable/hide any of the default collections that you don't want to use (as well as any of your custom collections that you may not want to use all of the time).

Check boxes, because you can select multiples easier.

Don't EVER want my imaginary books to be viewed with my actual books.

I had hoped that Your Library would be the base and most collections would be subsets of it, but some would be completely separate.

I don't want to make others use it that way though, so I would hope that rather than a one size fits all decision there would be a way for each user to tailor how collections interacted within a user's library, how they interacted with the other libraries and the site as a whole, and how and what casual viewers would see.

Perhaps not all at once, but as a goal to work towards, along with adding user-defined collections, and hiding/deleting those not wanted.

A control panel with a lot of options and check boxes, and some function that would allow you to change the checks and update your library to reflect what you wanted. Even people who see it one way may want to change in the future.

Don't EVER want my imaginary books to be viewed with my actual books.

I had hoped that Your Library would be the base and most collections would be subsets of it, but some would be completely separate.

Thank you.

>178 _Zoe_:

The question is whether this is a formal, machine-guided and machine-forced subset or not. Surely, most users will plan to include all "currently reading" books in "my library," right? But then a user will have a book that they're currently reading that they don't want to include in their library--maybe it's a friends, or its from the library or whatever.

The point is, there is no perfect hierarchical system of collections users will agree on together. And there is no personal system that a user won't want to break at some point. Why not have the keeping track of collections be the users' responsibility, rather than giving them an inflexible system?

Check boxes, because you can select multiples easier.

Why would we ever want to select multiples if the collections themselves are nested. Just nest your collections so that the multiples are implicit, right?

# 179
The point is, there is no perfect hierarchical system of collections users will agree on together. And there is no personal system that a user won't want to break at some point. Why not have the keeping track of collections be the users' responsibility, rather than giving them an inflexible system?

That is exactly what I asked for, rather than be forced to have all books in one collection, because somehow the mere existence of structures that allow us 'Dunderheads' to set up our libraries on our terms, ruins the lives of the side that you're on.

Why would we ever want to select multiples if the collections themselves are nested. Just nest your collections so that the multiples are implicit, right?

I am not even sure I understand this question. Why would I want something to be implicit if I can make it explicit ? At some point when we can make user defined collections I will be moving books into fiction, and then the type of fiction: mystery, SFF, Horror, ....., I will move my non-fiction into NF, and probably the subject it covers. I also would assume that 'currently reading' would be in my library, fiction/non-fiction, and the subject/genre collection that it belongs in. I can't see removing a book from all other collections just because it ends up in my 'currently reading'.

So far I have 160 shelves on Goodreads, and I expect I will have fewer here, but still a goos-sized number.

And no I don't care if others think I should use tags only for that. Tags are labels, collections are boxes, and I see nothing wrong with labeling and then putting it in a box.

Why not have the keeping track of collections be the users' responsibility, rather than giving them an inflexible system?

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Aren't you the one who was advocating an inflexible system, while I wanted more user control? My whole problem is that we aren't going to be allowed to alter one of the defaults.

>179 timspalding:: Why would we ever want to select multiples if the collections themselves are nested. Just nest your collections so that the multiples are implicit, right?

I think the example you give previously in the same message is a good example of why multiples would be wanted: people will want, for example, to have a "borrowed from public library" collection that is not included in "Your Library", but their "Currently Reading" collection may need to intersect with both of those at once. Or are you proposing that a collection can be nested within two others at the same time?

183>

What would sub-sets give you that the more generic overlap wouldn't?

I've assumed since day zero that a book can be in multiple collections; once you have this, you can have any sort of Venn diagram you want (arbitrary overlap, subsets, you name it.) Why do you need a more complicated data and UI structure for what is essentially just a special case of this?

184: Yes, I also have assumed a Venn diagram, and that it'd be my responsibility to check both items if for example I want a book to be in both Your Library and Professional (even if I happen to know that Professional is a subset of Your Library -- I can imagine an alternative situation of Your Library for books that belong to me, and Professional including some of these books and also other books that I use at work and belong to my employer). This is prone to error, but easy to correct with a power edit feature.

179: Now I'm now confused. You are saying LT will not enforce a hierarchy, what is what I've assumed, and which is good, but also that multiple selections could be implicit -- so for example I could check Professional and have a book automatically be placed in Your Library also if I have somehow informed LT that this is how I want my collections organized?

Some of this discussion brings up an interesting point. Does Tim want to make a system that makes it easy for using Collections for subject classifications that had previously been using tags? Wouldn't that weaken the tag clouds which are a major selling point of LT?

Hmm, that is an interesting point. Initially I thought that collections weren't intended for subject classifications and that we were meant to have only a small number of collections. Reading the thread of what people intend to use collections for, though, it's clear that plenty of people are going to use them for subjects and plan to have upwards of 20 collections. Also, Tim refused yesterday to say what collections are for.

As someone who is very new to this site and joined simply to catalog and organize my books, all I am expecting from Collections is a way to separate into 'buckets' books I want from books I have. I'd like to have a separate 'bucket' for books I have read, books I might want to read, and for books that I don't have anymore. That's it. As far as any other details such as subject matter or book content, I will use the tags. It's been quite interesting, to say the least, observing this ongoing debate amongst the 'power users'.

142--Glad the option will be there to see all books that I've entered in one place. If we all know from the start that All Books can include books from a variety of sources, than I think visitors to one's page would not conclude that you have read or own all the books in that all inclusive tab. If someone wants to take a look at books you have read, or something more specific than they would obviously look in one of your specified collections. However, I can see the strong desire some wish to obliterate this option so I suppose a hide button could be used as suggested.

171-I think that this format for the menu seems most intuitive. I would prefer this menu to be on the edit page so that I could input the information as I add each book to the catalog. I think checkboxes would work best.

Thought people might be interested:
Current state of the collections manager...

189> Looks nice. Two questions: Apparently you're trying to add a new collection, so why do I see a "Delete this collection"? What is the difference between "disable and hide" and "delete"?

189 > Looks good. (I also like the pooch-face on the baby, which reminds me of mine after eating. My baby's face, not mine.)

My question is probably an obvious one, but if we have overlapping collections -- e.g., "read" and "owned" -- with some books in both, "count towards total books" shouldn't count anything twice. So is this a shorthand way of setting a "count-this-book" attribute for each book in the collection? and, if so, will there be ways to toggle settings on a book-by-book basis? and, if so, will changing the collection setting overwrite the book-by-book setting or will books' individual settings be preserved and have priority? (or, will there also be an "apply to all books in collection or preserve individual book settings" checkbox?)

... since said baby is done with feeding and ready to go back to sleep, i'll wrap this up now ...

189: ohhhhhh *likes* interesting little sneak-peek hehe

And omg baby cuteness!

190> I read the 'Add new collection' at the top as being a button to do that with, and the box below being an existing collection you are editing the attributes of. Maybe it would be lrss confusing if Add New Collection was at the bottom instead?

Chris, I like it, looks like its doing what I'd want it to be doing. What are the differences between "disabling and hiding" and "deleting" a collection - category only, contents thereof?

Brilliant! Now I'm even more excited ......

The "Collections Manager" looks great, the conceptPuppy is absolutely adorable. You do good work Chris!

The "hide" option is there because there are times where you might want to have a colllection that you don't want to see all of the time. It could be a seasonal collection or something that you use only occasionally. With the hide option you won't have to see that collection in collection lists, etc.

190: There is a 'delete collection' at the bottom because the collection is added immediately after you click the add-collection button.

Will the hidden collections still show up on this edit page? (Presumably, or else where would we find them again?)

Also, I'm assuming that we'll only be able to delete our own collections, not the defaults?

I would put Add New Collection at the bottom, to encourage people to look at the defaults before making a new one.

And of course I have to add a comment that this list should really show all collections, for completeness.

Also, will there eventually be a checkbox for "private"? And since there's a checkbox for recommendations, what about Members with Your Books?

Yes, hidden collections will always show up in the collections manager. As of this moment we are still debating how the default collections will be treated as far as deletions go.

Originally the new collection button was at the bottom but many, many people don't scroll to find things at the bottom of the window (something we learned from experience with the home page customization box).

Yes, there will eventually be a checkbox for private. In fact, it's already in the code just disabled for this screenshot.

Awww, this is brilliant! I'm am so looking forward to its implementation.

I initially thought that the "Add new collection" should go at the bottom, too--but, I see your point. The screenshot looks like it will be fairly intuitive. Like lquilter (message 191), I'm interested to know what happens when a book is in more than one collection which settings may conflict or overlap.

Awesome job, all!

To a certain extent, I understand your point about people not scrolling to the bottom. But I thought a large part of collections was that some of them would have the same meaning across users. So I'd think you'd want to encourage the non-scrollers to use the defaults, rather than to start collections that could have been covered by the defaults if only they'd bothered to look.

As for deleting defaults, I don't think it should be possible--because what if someone changes their mind afterwards and wants to get it back?

What _Zoe_ said.

Very nice! I especially like the slightly different color palette. ;)

At first, I was going to disagree with Zoe in #202, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Those default collections, especially to start, are important to the initial success of collections as a whole. As long as "Add New Collection" is highly differentiated from the rest of the list (as it is now being peachy/orange, or also could be as a button rather than part of the list), then people will notice it and use it.

I think it's BOOOTIFUL -- so neat and clean and sharp!!

Now I'm getting desperate: WHEN ARE WE GONNA GET IT?!?!?!

(Sorry - I'm not yelling in anger, but excitement --- and maybe I'm almost hyperventilating!)

Add me to the list asking, "How do you make sure a book is only counted once if it's in two or more 'Count toward total books' Collections?"

sigh. enough jawing already! this is a major tease. the sooner we get collections, the sooner our individual gripes can assume some substance!

206: You can't even imagine how much I want to be finished with it so that you can gripe about it. :)

Ooh! I hadn't seen the 'Click and drag to arrange your collections' in the little picture here. Yay!

Yeah, overlapping count/no count will be interesting. One 'Private' overrides any number of not-private, but count is a little more variable.

And 'Factor in shared books' would be interesting too - there have been a lot of requests to not consider certain books in shared, and that option would help with that.

One odd thing - the first two checkboxes apply to the books-in-this-collection - the last one applies to the collection (and not necessarily to the books in it...or does it?). If it's a way of hiding a bucket and not just the books in it, maybe it should be separated from the other options?

Every bit of data will be chewed over and suggestions made about it!

#205:

That doesn't sound hard at all. Books are still the fundamental unit -- "total" doesn't add up your collections, it adds up your BOOKS, unless they're in "don't count this" collections. There's nothing hard about it.

I suppose it would theoretically be possible for a book to be in both "count this" and "don't count this" collections -- that would be the tricky scenario, not for it to be in two "count this" collections.

>205 HeathMochaFrost:, 210

I would envision that if a book was in any "count this" collections, it would be counted, but just once.

So if I put a book in my wishlist, which is not counted, and then later bought the book and added it to my Your Library, but forgot to delete it from my wishlist, it would get counted at that point. "count" overrides "don't count".

I can't imagine a situation where the opposite would be desirable, but I haven't done extensive research on the matter. Similarly, I can't imagine a situation where you would want a book that was in two "count" collections to actually be counted twice. This would just not make sense to me, but maybe others have a different opinion.

Can anyone think of situations in which you would want the double-count? Or the "don't count" to override the "count" ?

I don't feel strongly either way, but I keep a list of all the books I've read in my Library, because I like sorting by Date Read. If I made a separate "not owned" collection, I would still keep all the books I've read in my Library so that I could see the complete list of read books. In this case, I'd like "don't count" to override "count".

211>

Clearly I wasn't clear -- I thought I was saying that not only would I not want the double-count but that it shouldn't even be a problem, since the counting counts books not collections. One book, one count, even if it's in a dozen collections.

Lorax, I think 211 was addressing the situation that you specifically mentioned as a problem, when a book is in both a count and a don't-count collection.

214>

I thought 211 was addressing both -- the count/no-count portion made sense to me so I didn't respond to that, just to the part that confused me.

>215 lorax: I thought that was just general discussion of the same subject; you and HeathMochaFrost both assumed that a book shouldn't be counted twice, but you were actually focused on the technical issues (or non-issues). It's not that your point wasn't understood, but that there were other related points that could also be addressed.

I would think "count" would naturally override "don't count", by virtue of counting books being more of a default than not counting them. Consider that the bulk of your books are going to be in some collection, where you will want to draw your statistics from; other "don't count" collections will likely be peripheral to this. Hence, your default is "count".

As an example, given the collections pictured above: My main library collection will be countable, and will contain all the books I physically own. (This will likely be standard practice for most folks, yes?) Now I also decide to use the Favorite Books collection, most of which I own -- but say I've got a favorite book that I don't actually own yet. I'll want to flag Favorite Books as an "uncountable" collection, yet favorite books that I own (also located in my main library collection) will still need to be counted. Thus "count" overrides "don't count".

Should the counting in this discussion count? *blinks*

>213 lorax:, 215

You were clear, my post was in agreement about the number of times to count a thing, and you are right, it wouldn't be hard due to the fact that they are counting books not collections. But as Zoe was saying, I think I was using your post as a jumping off point to discuss count/no-count override semantics, and meanwhile agreeing with you.

>212 _Zoe_:

And there ya go, there is a great example for don't count overriding count. I would probably not use it that way, but certainly its a valid usage. In fact, more valid than mine. Mine was a mistake on my part, as I probably would have wanted to remove the item from my wishlist when I moved it to my your library. With the don't count overriding count semantics, I personally wouldn't have a problem, so that would work for me too. Might be hard to figure out why a book wasn't getting counted if I accidentally left it in a don't count collection, but that's not a major issue.

>217 saltmanz:

Maybe what we really need is a Count/Don't Count/Undefined. Where undefined collections override neither. That would satisfy 217, as well as allowing the 212 behavior. Though now we are just piling on complexity again.

>infiniteletters - PLLLBBBBBBBTTTTT! :).

My scenario for count/don't count is like _Zoe_'s - books I've read will be spread over Your Library and Unowned collections (library books, etc). If I put them into Your Library (so I can see that I've read them), I still don't want them to count (the don't-count attribute from Unowned should over-ride). I suppose I could make a Read collection (actually, that would be more fun/useful than Currently Reading and TBR!) and mark that Don't Count if Count ends up over-riding...bleah. Too many scenarios. Database schemae are _fun_....

I like the Collections Manager interface. Clean/simple. :)

I like it, cD! Looks very clear and usable, very LT.

A question this discussion has brought up in my mind is whether, with some collections marked Count and others marked Not Count, will there be a place where *I* can see the total number of *records* I have in the system? Not how many books I own, since some of them are not mine (library books, borrowed from a friend, wishlist), but total records? Presumably one would not want this figure out there where other people could see that it's higher than the number of my books that they can actually see.

223: Such as, oh, statistics? ;)

224:

That would do, but I was thinking of how when I'm on the Your Library page, I can see at the top of the page that there are X number of books. With Collections, that will be, presumably, only the number of books in the collection I'm in at the time.

Also, at the top of my home page, I can see the total. Will that still be the case? I am assuming so.

It's all about avoiding extra mouse-clicks - too many repetitive strain injuries in my life already :-/

I presume that there would be a total items count somewhere on the "All Books" page...if not, I'd like one!

That's likely to start an argument about collections-mixing. But there will be one. We need to track it for 200-limit reasons anyway :)

Yeah, but tracking for 200-limit reasons doesn't explain why that collection shouldn't appear on the list with the "hide" option, like all the others do.... :P

*bump* So, what's the status here? You said it would probably be about 2 weeks before it went live.... .......... So where is it? Are we close?

It's done for everyone but you, Heather. You didn't get the memo? ;)

Yes it's great. The wishlist auto-import went very smoothly and I'm nearly finished tweaking my TBR collection. What fun!

I swear for one small moment I thought it was true. ..... You all are going to be the death of me. lol

We're still working on it, every day for Chris.

hhmmm, maybe you need to bump him from 23hours a day to 23.5...

;)

Don't give him any ideas!

Yes, I'm working on it. Tim was pulled away so it's just me right now. I'm more slow and steady than frantic and crazy. But I'll give you an update with what features I have ready so far:

* Collection manager is finished
* Collection display interface (checkbox version) is finished and is "widgetized" so it is easy to add to pages.
* Collections column has been added to the catalog and works like a charm. Collections are listed as links, much like tags now. Double-click and it converts to a checklist so that you can add/remove collections for that book.
* We are currently working on a better interface for the catalog. We're just not 100% satisfied with the above method.
* Collections section has been added to the book Edit page
* Collections section has been added to the quick-edit of the Add books results.
* Collections section has been added to the left side of the Add books page.

Unfortunately there's still quite a bit to do. It's a major change in the way that a lot of the navigation in catalogs works. We're getting there though.

"Unfortunately there's still quite a bit to do."

Oh the Humanity!

You all are just toying with me... it's like a christmas that never comes.

I is hopin' you ain't eatin' nor sleepin' 'til youse gawn and dun it!

And I'm liking "widgetized"!

;)))

And I'm not offering any more of my books on BookMooch until Collections is here. Let's see how long my inventory can last... :)

On the other hand, I've been deliberately more restrained in my acquisitions (was it "other authors" or "author function" that we still don't have for previously-entered books?) which means more money to spend on other goodies like yarn.

Oooo, yarn! Pretty ... and tactile.....

>235 conceptDawg: what features I have ready so far

Pictures, or it didn't happen!

>238 AnnaClaire:: You hold off buying books and buy yarn instead? Are you feeling okay? You can't catalogue yarn! ;-)

Oh yes you can....Ravelry.com

Nooo... I don't need another internet addiction!

No! I have already been doing much less needlework because of LT. I don't need another community to make me catalog instead of stitch.

>241 Nicole_VanK:
Of course I'm feeling okay. I'm a knitter, too. ;)

242: I will not check out that site, I will not check out that site......

#242
Psst, Heather, you gotta check out that site ;-)

246:
Psst, Heather, that's where the memo is. ;)

>234 readafew:, 235
I'm a nice, open, friendly kind of guy, but I'm really starting to grudge the seven minutes and twelve seconds per day that you guys seem to be wasting on silly stuff like family, sleeping, hygiene etc. Just get a move on!

ps. sorry for pranking you, Heather.

eta ps

You think I spend time on hygiene? Silly you.

>ksnort HAha! "That Dawg is STIIIIINNK-eeee."

(PS. "ksnort" is the sound my dog makes when it sniffs something pungent, it also happens to be sound I make when beer comes out of my nose and hits the keyboard.)

Yeah, I can smell him all the way here in Denver. ;-)

(PS. "ksnort" is the sound my dog makes when it sniffs something pungent, it also happens to be sound I make when beer comes out of my nose and hits the keyboard.) (#251)

Funny how things work out sometimes, isn't it? ;)

Any news on the status of collections? :-)

LOVE IT! I'm so excited. Just one question...we'll be able to move books from collection to collection, right?

That's what they've said!

helllloooo... elllooo....elloo...llooo..loo..oo.o

*BUMP!*

So, is the new homepage ideas stuff related to Collections, or totally seperate? Is Collections still being actively worked on? Can we pleeeeeease pretty pretty please with sugar on top get some kind of timeline? Anything? Might it come out before Christmas, at least??

(and I'm not trying to bribe or anything, but I *did* get a raise and I want to donate, but was kinda wanting to donate when Collections came as sort of a special thank-you for that....) *innocent face*

Back on the first, Tim said Collections were being held hostage until they had a new employee. Does that still hold? Or has the ransom demand been changed to the new "designer" version is approved?

My one-year subscription came up and I was going to hold the upgrade hostage until Collections came out, but some books I mooched showed up. I need to find something else to hold hostage. Unfortunately, Talk is so busy that I don't think The Powers That Be would notice if I just shut up.

On second thought, maybe I should look into plain old bribery.

Let's see... Brie is specifically for The Algorithm.... Let me go check the databases on Ravelry. I'll see you when I pull myself away form their forums!

Doesn't anyone know someone in Maine? What if we ship an employee there? COLL-LLEC-SHUNS!!

Hey, I'll move to Maine if necessary! Anything to get collections going!

>262 dreamlikecheese: Better watch out! A horde of LTers may descend on you to pack you off to Maine if you're not careful.

I'm really excited to see the collections function coming, It's the only thing I think LT is really lacking.

Sorry to be obtuse here, but can I assume that after the books are entered you would be able to look at and interact with the collections separately? Could I see a list view of only my actual library, and then a list view of my wish list?

Sorry to ask newbie questions. If anyone wants to post a link a a dev chat thread on the current status of the collections I'll be happy to follow that. I've been looking for it and so far this thread is the closest I've come.

Thanks! Woot!

Unfortunately there *is* no definitive current status of collections, beyond "we're working on it" and "it hasn't been forgotten".

From what I have been able to gather, you will be able to view and interact with each collection seperately.

I love the idea, though a vertically arranged UI system would be uncomfortable since everything here is so horizontal.

I think a Wishlist function would be lovely- or a To Read List.

I previously posted this in the beta group but it's time to post this in a more general group. Here is part of the current design for collections UI in the catalog. This is not a mockup. This is working (and working well) on our dev server...



We're trying to iron out some niggly bugs and some (always) last minute features but we're very close to launching. Oh close? Weeks, not months, that's for sure. How many weeks? You won't get me on that one. I must reserve some wiggle room for unforeseen craziness.

To make way for collections we have reengineered everything about how we store and retrieve catalog information for every member. It was a major structural change. This was needed so that we could make things as fast as possible. In reality you are all using collections on the live site already, you are just using a single collection and we haven't exposed the UI for changing them.

So buck up little campers! Launch date is approaching.

Quick, someone pass me the smelling salts!

Whoo-Hoo! That looks wonderful :-)

Looks great - very cool!! Thanks for the update, cD - always helps to "see" work in progress!

actually it's not coming this is an Andy Kaufman kind of joke being perpetrated at our expense by the LT staff. Nice try cD but I'm finally on to your scheme!

Bp~~~

Damn. Foiled again!

Looks lovely! It has come a long way from that very first picture with the weird colors :P
Thanks for all the hard work, guys, I can't wait for the launch!!!

Chris is going in to the ring with female wrestlers.

# 267

Oh close? Weeks, not months, that's for sure. How many weeks? You won't get me on that one. I must reserve some wiggle room for unforeseen craziness.

CD you do know there are only 4-5 weeks in a month ? If it isn't months, it can't be more than 4-5 weeks. I think you got yourself on that one.

After surgery, they'll moider 'im!

>276 FicusFan:

But if it's months plural, then that gives them up to 8-9 weeks left.

Unfortunately. Here's hoping they won't need that long!

Omg. omg omg omg omg.

*almost faints!!*

...... Are you going to be kind enough to launch Collections on a weekend, so we can all play with it and test it out, or evil enough to launch on a weekday when people work and must go to bed early and such?

About the different collections in that drop-down... Which ones are default? I *think* I remember a convo about what Collections to add as default, or already-there, besides what users will make themselves. Is "wishlist" going to be there automatically? Anything else?

Heather, take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

Whatever you do, don't hold it!

276>

Seven weeks is not "months".

It is one and a half months. :p

We can wait one and a half months. See point 5 here and check the date!

I didn't think I was getting excited, but maybe I am.

283>

Pah, I'll see your August 2007 and raise you October 2005:

http://www.librarything.com/blog/2005_10_01_archive.php

(Check out "This month's development priorities").

Heh.

Yeah I thought it was already going on when I first got here. So that's a "Heh" from Tim and a "Foiled again" from cD, maybe they're really onto something!

And I just broke Work Combining. Shh maybe nobody will notice.

Meh.

(Feigning nonchalance...)

This is progress. And it is looking good. Real good.

Personally, I've decided I'm not going to get worked up about Collections until I see it live. I'm not going to let teasing comments like those tossed to us by Chris and Tim get me overly excited. Honest. Now if I could just quit bouncing...

Sorry if this question has already been asked and answered, but I started a separate library for my children's books because I didn't want 'visitors' to have to wade through thousands of children's books to see what I like reading as an adult. Am I going to be able to merge these two collections with this new feature? Please tell me yes!

I'm not stalking you Bonnie, I just have this thread starred :) You would have to reenter the books and then put them in a separate collection (say, "Children's Books") which, depending on your preference, can count or not count towards the total of your books. I think.

Yes, but not when it debuts. Much to be done...

Could we please have collections visible in the tab-export (and possibly csv) from day one? So far the extra author-roles hasn't made it into the export files which is a major pain, so also having collections as second-class citizens would really suck!
Please!

>291 girlunderglass: If it wasn't for you, girlunderglass, I wouldn't have even known about this feature! You've saved me hours of fruitless work.

>292 timspalding: Are you talking to me?! *she says in her best Robert deNiro voice*

>294 bonniebooks:, re 292

I wondered that myself.

>295 Alixtii: re 294 re 292 (this is getting too complicated) I think and hope so. It's nice that they will be adding new features along the way but, to be honest, I just want them to just launch it already!

I seem to recall that Tim has said elsewhere that there would be a way to merge separate accounts into separate collections in one account, but it wouldn't be available when collections first come out (first make sure they work for one account, then...). I presume that's what he's talking about in 292.

298: Correct. There are a LOT of things that we can do once collections are live and working well. We want to make sure both of those things happen first though. :)

So...how exactly do you get to be in the Beta group? Way back when, I was told you just had to request to join. But, when I did, I was completely ignored. Nothing at all...not even a "buzz off."

>300 PhoenixTerran:
Check your profile comments.

301>That was quick...thanks so much!

Collections beta? Sign me up, please!

>303 r.orrison: ditto!

Me please!

I think you just need to roll collections out and let us ALL beta test it, otherwise everyone who reads RSI is going to be requesting membership in the Beta group.

303 and on, I haven't seen any indications that they plan to beta Collections first.

I know, but I'm not taking chances. :)

Just to allay excitement for those not already in the BETA group: We're not beta testing collections right now. That's not to say that we won't beta test the feature before releasing it....just that we're not in testing right now.

"That's not to say that we won't beta test the feature before releasing it"

That's your idea of allaying excitement???? Now I'd sell my soul to be in that group (at times like these one realizes how empty one's life is :P ) :D

I can't wait for this to be done. The lack of Collections is all that's holding me back from recommending LT to family and friends.

If you're still taking volunteers for beta testing Collections, please add me!
Thanks

I'd also love to be in the beta testing group, if you've got one more spot.

I hate to just follow the crowd, but I'm up for being in a Collections beta.

My current LT account only houses books I've read, but I've got a list of books I've read as a child and a wishlist over at Goodreads that I've been dying to move over to LT. Plus some specialized lists, like SciFi TBR, 1001 TBR, etc....

It must be close now, very close (hoping, praying etc...)...

... I am becoming nearly obsessive. I know that it's probably not this week, and I knew that it wasn't going to be last week .... nevertheless I keep obsessively checking the site with bated breath, and occasional little heart fillips when there's a new post on a Collections thread or New features or the blogs ....

It reminds me of a panel i was on a couple of years ago, when one of the members kept hinting at a new rulemaking and how fabulous and exciting it was going to be. One of the other panelists said he'd never expected to experience such an exciting strip tease on a law panel. (Or something to that effect.)*

* PS - The rulemaking was good, but it wasn't all that.

>316 lquilter: lquilter - I almost hate to do this to you, but here's a little Collections tidbit: http://www.librarything.com/topic/58054

Doesn't do anything, but still . . . .

Ah, interesting! Must be very close now surely? This weekend maybe? Next week? March maybe?

Beware the Ides of March!

AAAAAAhhhhhhhhggggggggggg.....

(Run Screaming)

>318 plekter: March maybe?

The real question is "of which year?"

>321 sqdancer:
No kidding. Collections have been coming "soon" since I first heard of them -- which has to be at least a year now.

I think people should be reading the changelog for cDawg's WikiThing page . ;)

where is that?

oh, found it. Well what does almost mean?
How soon is now>????????

>323 DaynaRT:,
He's such a tease (I keep telling myself so as not to get my hopes up). Although if soon was tomorrow, that would be great, I'm not going to have much to do at work tomorrow.

"I had hoped to release by Feb 25 but it might get pushed back to March 2nd or March 9th depending on how things work out. We might not make the deadline for the 25th and we're having our annual (semi-annual? bi-annual? every-once-in-a-while-annual?) LT developer conference* the first week in March so that kinda throws the timing off a bit. *conference: meaning a few people in a room drinking lots of coke, wine, and other spirits and debating obscure knowledge of cheeses and ancient history. "

Oh well. Guess I'll stop checking EVERY MORNING.

9th of March. Oh well. We will just have to read while waiting. Not a bad idea!

Hmm... March 9th. That's just over two weeks. Where have I heard that before?

*not holding my breath*

:-p

girlunderglass, where did you get that quote? (was that from this year?)

See the Changelog that Chris has in the wiki.

re 327, I have to say I love that definition of "conference"!

I think we're close enough to March 9th that I can start holding my breath.

Make sure I'm conscious 4 days from now!

My guess is since they're having this conference thingy now, they will start finishing things up on the collections on March the 9th, and not release it on the 9th?

333: If not, we'll pick through your books. :)

We taped a thirty-minute bullshit session which we'll put on YouTube. It ends with Chris promising collections in two weeks.

so nothing new?

;)

This is getting Kafkaesque.

indeed.

I'm more reminded of Godot...

Indeed, the Godot is appropriate for the absurdity that has become of the Collections situation. I seriously don't understand how people even get their hopes up anymore. My reaction now? Collections? I'll believe it when I see it....stable for at least two weeks.

There used to be a Joe's Crab Shack up here that had prominently painted on its side "FREE CRAB TOMORROW" ... maybe LibraryThing should replace "What's On Your Bookshelf?" with "Collections Coming In Two Weeks!" as it's slogan.

heh ...

 

Collections! Collections! I love ya! Collections! You're always two weeks away!

(It has reduced from two months to two weeks over the, uh, four years I've been here. Maybe in another four years it'll be down to two days!)

See this is how I know I spend too much time on LT. About a week ago I had a dream. They unveiled collections and it was glorious. Choirs of angels singing, dogs and cats living in harmony. Life was finally perfect. No more world hunger or war. You'd never get another spam email or telemarketing call during dinner. You'd never lose your keys or wallet ever again. And then the powers that be said something along the lines "Well, we've decided we think it's not really that great and we're tired of collections anyway. We're scrapping the whole thing and going off to become yak farmers. Bye!" And then suddenly there were singing shrimp and the dream just went weird and unrelated to LibraryThing. Still, collections have actually crept into my dreams, that can't be healthy. It's all this anticipation, it's just not good for a person!

I am getting a Collection notice on my Add Books page. I'm not sure what it means, but it appears that my book tags that begin with "library book" don't show in the basic tag block, but are remanded to an area above it. I wonder whether I should recopy the tags into the tag block or do something about collections. For me ultimately, my books with the tag, "library book", should be in a separate collection than my regular books.

>345 vpfluke:. Oh! (Kid in candy store grin) I think they might have pushed something they didn't mean to. I'm seeing collections stuff in the results box. It doesn't do anything yet, but I think it means we're getting close.

Well, I've taken the precaution of copying all my tags except "library book" from the top area and putting back into the tag block on the edit page (doesn't hold on the Add Books page). I have now put 'library book' (without quotes) in my comments field. All my books which have the tag "library book" (some 128) have kept all their tags if they don't appear on the Add Books page.

I don't think I'm seeing what you're seeing, vpfluke. I tried to add a book with the tag "library book" alongside another tag, and I didn't see any separate top area, or anything else unusual about my add books results*, or the catalog record. Could you describe what you're seeing a little more?

(* except for the collections and currently reading buttons, which don't seem to do anything except change color when you hover over them.)

I just saw the same collection button/drop down that didn't do anything. I thought we would have fanfare, trumpets, drumrolls...

Maybe we could take turns hovering over those buttons until something happens . . sort of a vigil

omg omg omg!! *jumps up and down*

Puuuuuuurty buttons!! I don't really care right now that they don't do anything, because omg!

*knows better then to get excited about collections!*

...... *is excited anyways!*

OK, I'm seeing what vpfluke reported a few hours ago at #345... except it doesn't actually do anything.

What's up?

Yes, some code was pushed that shouldn't have been.

I'm actually counting my blessings that the revealed page didn't cause about a million problems because that code is NOWHERE NEAR being ready to release. It's had about an hour of work and it was just "hey, what if we put this here? No, here? Maybe here?"....kind of work.

Needless to say....you won't see that for long. :)

But, yes. Collections are much closer.

Remember when Tim said that I promised Collections in two weeks? You know....up there in message 336? What he didn't tell you, of course, is that I promised them in 2 weeks if he would quit adding feature requests. :)

We'll see. heh.

>354 AsYouKnow_Bob: What's up?

Not Collections. :)

Let me tell ya, there isn't a single person on the face of this Earth (or any of the various surrounding planetoids) that wants Collections finished more than me. Seriously. I'm so over Collections that I can't even put it into words. And even if I could I'm pretty sure that they would be NSFW.

Collections dev. Every waking moment. Until they are finished.

Oh...forgot to mention:
I'm glad that you liked the buttons. You'll see more of them soon.

358: And you are probably also the *only* person on this earth who is "so over" the concept/idea/etc of Collections!! lol 'Course, I'm sure I would be too if I worked on it constantly.

.... Which I *will* be as soon as it comes out!

Creeping featurism, eh? I though Tim was more the get-it-out-so-people-can-use-it-and-perfect-it-later type. You need to sit down and have a talk with your boss about whether that last thing he asked for *really* has to be in the first cut.

Honestly, we should have released Collections as a simple feature in the catalog first. That part's been done for about 2 months. We could have added on features on other pages. The problem is that many of our members don't see incremental development as a good thing and want to see features fleshed out before they appear. We erred on the side of caution for this feature because it is so intertwined with the rest of the system.

It's quite a complicated project. I feel like I've modified about a hundred source files in some way or another. And all of this going on while other development changes those files and interfaces, which means that merging them is more work.

It's a big deal and I'm excited to be closing the book on it very soon. There are many other projects that I have stacked up that I want to work on. There really are some GREAT projects waiting in the wings.

>362 conceptDawg: "The problem is that many of our members don't see incremental development as a good thing..."

Just wanted to say that I'm not one of them. I think incremental development is an excellent thing. I'm a software engineer by profession, and incremental development is a primary guiding principle on any project I'm involved with (if I'm allowed a say in that, of course ^_^).

I dare say that most people on LT don't really care that much about the extra extra extra features that will come with Collections; maybe in the long run we will, but not now - now we just want a way to FINALLY be able to add our TBRs and wishlists etcetera. IMHO, it would've been a much better idea to just release that first and then worry about adding more features. Especially since many people (like me) check LT every day just to see if the Collections have been added yet (in whatever form).

I'm more middle of the road. It's good to decide on a minimal useful feature set so the first release doesn't take too long. On the other hand, sometimes when you release just part of something, you make some decisions that lock you into doing something a certain way that becomes a problem when the rest of it is implemented.

Yeah. We're committed to the Big Dig now. That's not to say that Collections will be 100% when we release it but it'll be much closer than 10%. :)

I want to be hopeful that all of this effort will mean that the release won't be met with the usual crush of world-ending posts once it is released...

Yeah, one can hope, right?

362: It's a big deal and I'm excited to be closing the book on it very soon. .... There really are some GREAT projects waiting in the wings.

It's not nice to make the masses salivate over collections and mysterious GREAT things, all in the same post!

as for "they should have done it this way" etc -- i see no point in this kind of second-guess complaint. in fact nobody knows whether more people would have been happier to release at stage A, B, C ...

what I'm curious about, is if there is a revised date, since 3/9 is approaching very, umm, rapidly.

>367 stephmo: Unfortunately, the more time they devote to a feature, the more people are going to complain if it unnecessarily fails in a major way to meet their expectations. When they spend years and years on a feature, people expect it to be good. Especially since Collections is supposed to be the cure for cancer etc., I think that people are going to feel even more strongly than usual about all aspects of it.

I'll join you in hoping that it will be perfect for everyone, but I'll be surprised if it actually is.

At this point all I really care about is being able to transfer books into collections by tag (all of my wishlist tagged books go into the wishlist collection in one shot, etc).

I do want features, but I'll worry about them later.

I understand how many people might not like and/or understand incremental development, but I for one love trying to understand the hows and whys behind LT's developement in general, and I think it would've been cool to be there along for the ride as Collections grew... But whatever. I'm just excited anyways!

As for expectations, I'm just interested in seeing what it will do. I'm sure there will be bugs when it's all first pushed, as there is with all new features. I'm sure it will take time for me to figure it all out and see what I like and don't like.... I'm just excited about going through all that, like I do with any new LT-feature. I don't care so much about *what* Collections will do, as simply being able to play around with it when it comes! (prolly minority opinion there, but oh well)

>368 lquilter: Being that Tim said they had a youtube video (which I've been unable to find) that said cD reported two weeks (with an attached caveat of no new features, which LT is now infamous for IMNSHO) for Collections to be rolled out and Tim's post shows a date of 3/6, don't hold your breath for 3/9. Par for the course.

Of course, it's possible the purported video is older, but I wouldn't figure it is by much.

The fabled video was shot on Friday just before I headed to the airport to return home from the "LT Developers Conference."

We didn't get an exorbitant amount of actual code finished last week but we did get quite a lot of work completed that would have been hard or impossible to do if we weren't in the same room. There were a couple of nice Collections features coded up (one by Tim that does what eromsted is talking about in m.370) but the bulk of the remaining work is still my responsibility and I'm serious about getting it done in the next two weeks.

That is going to be a little tougher because I am now going out of town at the end of this week for my grandfather's funeral. That could slow things down by a few days, but only a few days.

*sends hugs re grandfather's death*

Chris (CD) is right. We should have introduced it as a catalog-level feature, with no complexity and without redesigning anything else, like catalog icons. On the other hand, we've thought and rethought various features that, I think, will turn out well—like Currently Reading.

Anyway, I made progress tonight. The script that moves books tagged "wish list" and etc. into collections automatically has been done. When I get back to Portland, I'm on the last round of icon changes—they go with a new button scheme that cD developed—and some helper functions so that recommendations are based on what you say they should be based on, etc. The last 10% takes a lot of time, but we are definitely on that last 10%. Also, Chris doesn't get to keep his shiny new single-piece aluminum MacBook unless collections ships! :)

>373 conceptDawg: Chris, I'm really sorry to hear about your grandfather. That's definitely something that takes precedence and I'm sure everybody will understand that.

>375 timspalding: Tim, that's really cool that things tagged wishlist will automatically migrate. Will there be a way to do that with a separate account? For instance, I started a free account just for wishlist items because I don't like to list books on this account that I don't have, physically or digitally. Would I be able to migrate that entire account or should I start moving books over to this account and just tag them with 'wishlist' or '@wishlist'?

>376 kawika:

I think we'll have to do it for you. We could make a tool, but I think this is a long tail situation. I could make a tool that would help you, but then someone else is goingt o have a slightly different need.

>377 timspalding: I was thinking that using the import tool would work, even for people with other LT accounts?

377: Even just something to take 2 accounts, merge 1 into the other for a specific collection?

>379 infiniteletters: Are you asking me or Tim? If me, could you please expand, I'm not sure I understand the question.

> 379: Yeah, while most casal users probably don't have auxiliary accounts, I think Tim might be suprised by how many Thingamabrarians have extra accounts they'd like to merge into collections. (...I do...) An automated tool that would just let us merge accounts, even, would be nice (the collection-adding part I could easily enough do with tags, though I'd enjoy an option in the merge tool.)

ETA Talbin: the problem with the import tool is that it re-adds the books from sources - so any reviews, tags, comments, corrections, etc. don't get carried over. Or have they changed that so it will, since the last time I tried?

#376+

There are currently 158 accounts with "wishlist" in their name. This is certainly a lower bound of how many people will want to merge accounts, but -- even though I'm one of them, and would love to have an easier way than adding all those books again when we get Collections -- I don't think it's high enough to warrant the time needed to build a separate tool.

>382 lorax: That's assuming people all named their auxiliary wishlist accounts with "wishlist". I haven't. Granted, a good number will probably have, but too assume all have would be presumptive and, at least in my case, incorrect. However, melannen has also expressed a further use of the same concept I was asking about. For me, it doesn't really matter except for the time it'll take to import each book over, one by one. For others, there are different considerations and we're just asking about the possibility.

382>

That's assuming people all named their auxiliary wishlist accounts with "wishlist".

No, actually, it's not -- I said This is certainly a lower bound of how many people will want to merge accounts exactly because of that consideration.

Possibly some people might prefer to "buy down" their old wishlist accounts gradually, while adding new items to their wishlist collection on their main account, if it is cumbersome to merge accounts.

Lorax did say that 158 was a lower limit on the probably number of separate wishlist accounts; there are probably many that don't have that word in their name.

I was thinking I'd just copy my reviews to a Word file, export the second library, import it into the primary library, and paste the reviews back in. I figure it should take an hour tops. Not that I'd turn down something even easier, but I don't want to wait for a transfer tool to be built to get collections.

My bad....my brain is outrunning my eyes yet again. But, we don't know how involved a tool to integrate separate account like that would be, which is part of why I asked. For me, it's still pretty simple to move my stuff over. It'll just take time and not even that much, really...that's what the lil green plus sign is for, right?

384> "No, actually, it's not -- I said This is certainly a lower bound of how many people will want to merge accounts exactly because of that consideration."

True, but then you went on to make the conclusion that it isn't a high enough number to warrent a special tool. Given that you only specified a lower bound, that conclusion is unwarranted. What if the actual number were a million wishlist accounts? Would the effort be worth it in that case? From the data of a lower bound of 158 we don't know if the actual number is 158 or a million so there is no basis for your conclusion.

that's what the lil green plus sign is for, right?

That plus sign will do nothing but frustrate you as all it does is take you to the add books page. Better off copying and pasting the ISBNs of your wishlist books into the automatic import queue.

Well, obviously the upper bound is half of the total accounts, but I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that the number of wishlist accounts that don't have any indication in their name is not many orders of magnitude larger than the number that do, so a thousand or so wishlist accounts would be a reasonable upper bound.

And I'm now sorry I didn't spell that out in explicit detail originally. Every time I think something is "reasonable" or "obvious" I get blindsided by people who must think I'm too stupid to tie my own shoes.

> That plus sign will do nothing but frustrate you as all it does is take you to the add books page

Well, and it executes a search, but...

I think that collections will be followed by a month of updates and improvements. I don't think there's anyone who wants us to delay it so that we have an account-migration tool on day one. But we can make one, if there's demand.

Tim

I'd love to see one, Tim. But, I do have to admit that it's likely that by the time you guys have one worked up, I'll have migrated my wishlist over to the main account manually. But yes, definitely not something to delay the feature launch at all.

and it executes a search

I have about a 50% success rate with that; I didn't want to get his hopes up. ;)

I don't want to delay Collections, but I'm willing to wait for an account migration tool to get my son's book back into a separate Collection of my main account.

>391 timspalding:/393 and it executes a search

I think I once posted in a thread about the green plus: it never works for me. In both XP/IE6 and Vista/IE7, the green plus takes me to the Add Books page, but gives me a javascript error instead of performing the search. I have to hit the Search button myself.

*grumbles* As I've complained about before, it doesn't excute a search for me. Stupid green plus-sign of fail doesn't do anything, as far as I'm concerned. Doesn't work.

But yes, certainly don't want Collections taking any longer then it has to just to get all these little improvements up/out.

I don't get an error, but all the green plus does is set up a search, not execute it. And usually, it doesn't set it up in an effective way; if I just hit the button, I get way too many results (or none at all), and end up re-typing the search parameters to something more efficient.

Please don't delay the launch of collections just to add additional ways to
get/merge books *into* collections. I'm sure I speak for the vast majority
of librarything users when I say that I'd prefer to have collections *now*,
with whatever features it has currently: additional features can always be
added later, if the basic structure has been settled (which it has for ages,
as far as I can make out). The list of additional features which depend on
collections will probably continue to get longer, faster than the features
themselves can be implemented, so it's far better to get the basic functionality
launched first, and *then* add features at your leisure (he said, hopefully).

>398 maspotts: hear, hear!

The problem is that there's no guarantee that the other features will ever appear. It often seems like once the initial excitement of a project wears off, it gets abandoned pretty quickly.

As negative as msg 400 sounds, it's unfortunately true in many cases that I've seen on LT. *sigh*

I have been an LT member for a little under two years and I have to respectfully disagree with the negativity expressed in 400/401...

I find that Tim and Co. are incredibly responsive and communicative about member requests and features. My LT experience has been that it seems that every time I turn around a new feature has been unveiled and I am so distracted in playing with it that I have barely gotten back to cataloging MY ACTUAL BOOKS when the next one is revealed.

Over the past year:
Author splitting
Male or Female Meme
Dead or Alive Meme (with comparison)
Will You Like It
Member Give-Aways
Individual/customizable home page
More catalogue columns and CK available in catalogue
New CK fields - events, names, relationships
Improved Helpers Zeitgeist with Helpers Log
Meme section of Profile
Disambigs on Combo page!
New CK fields - 1st words/lastwords/dedication/quotations/epigraphs/blurbers
SERIES!!!
Awards/Characters/Places
Members with this work
Find Friends
Tag view/Edit Tags

-- that is just going back over the past year of the things of interest to me personally. Doesn't even include stuff that I don't use / am not computer literate enough to understand - LT on Twitter, Import stuff, widgets stuff/covers, technical stuff (API?), updates/upgrades that give us more speed etc. Two years ago I thought LT was just about perfect - so much functionality for cataloging - JUST what I was looking for...now though, there is just SO MUCH MORE here!

Don't get me wrong, I am eagerly awaiting collections - but I can make do with tags for now and there is more than enough functionality on LT to keep me busy for a VERY long time (including cataloging the NEXT 500 books in my library).

I get the feeling that sometimes people get so fixated on their pet "eagerly-awaited" feature that they are missing some of the really awesomely amazing stuff the Tim, the Dawg and the others are doing here.

402: Yes, but how many of those on the list are little "pet projects" that never seemed to be talked about before? (like the memes) They are nice to have around, but when compared to other features that are VERY USEFUL where the ball seems to have been dropped....

I'm thinking specifically of the Currently Read/etc checkboxes, and the Tag Mirror. I know the checkboxes will supposidely be taken care of by collections, but it was *supposed* to be a full-working thing way back when it was released! What happened? They dropped the ball.

Same with Tag Mirror. It was disabled because of site problems or bandwidth or whatever, but then it came back part-way, but only part-way, and subsequent questions about it have yielded no results/conclusions.

I'm not saying there haven't been good features put out and kept up with, I'm just pointing out that there *has* been wonderfully-promising features that have basically been abandoned.

You forgot making Other Authors work for books that had been entered before the feature was introduced.

ETA: and adding Other Roles to the main author field.

I don't disagree with the fact that some projects can get waylaid after they are released. That's been the consequences of having only ONE full-time developer devoted directly to LT. That's me.

Tim does a lot of work on the main site but he's often away on business or conferences. In the past that has left all site development to me. Obviously trying to get out new wiz-bang features and support all of the older ones can be a little trying in those circumstances. Luckily we've recently hired more programmers to help lighten the load but it'll take some time before they are up to speed on all of the parts of the system.

Most of the "pet projects" (and that's a good term for them) were thrown together by Tim. There are many times where he can't be working on large projects because of his time constraints but he can work on smaller features that might prove interesting. That's where those features are born: male/female, dead/alive, memes, etc. Occasionally a pet project will be born because it was something that one of us thew together during our "off-time." Yes, I program even when sitting in front of the TV "relaxing."

The new Mac screensaver is one of those. The LT team was sitting around talking after dinner during our Week of Code and I mentioned that I could get a cover-based screensaver concept out in 5 minutes. Ok, it took about 15, and Tim wanted to finish it so took that work and fleshed it out... but that's how it was born.

I have been completely Collections based for a while now. That means that all of those day-to-day bugs that I used to handle are now taking a lot longer to fix. Basically when Tim has time to fix them, or if one of our new programmers can fix it with limited knowledge of some of the systems.

Things are getting better. Every day.

When we release Collections a lot of other things are going to change too. That's why they are taking so long. A lot of other changes were rolled into the release. Good or bad, that's what's happened. We do aim to do a better job next feature release. I certainly don't want to go through what I'm going through right now.

---
By the way, what's not working about Tag Mirror now? I thought that I had re-enabled all functionality.

*tries REALLY hard not to get too off-topic, but.....*

*HUGS Chris!!!* Wow. First, I'm sorry!! I never saw any mention that the Tag Mirror had been fixed, so I assumed it was a lost cause. Last time I checked it out, the tags were listed, but when you click them it did nothing (instead of pulling up the box with books listed). Now it does!! THANK YOU!!!! *bookmarks Tag Mirror page* Seriously, that was one of my favorite lost features, how did I not know that was back?!?! Wheeeeee!

I think we'll be on collections for a LONG time after it releases. The problem will be deciding what to do and not to do, not the will to do it.

As long as you'll still be working on it afterwards, I'm all for incremental releases.

Okay, I have to ask.... **she hangs her head because she knows she's going to look stupid**

I know that Collections is going to allow us to have our libraries broken down into sections like wishlists and borrowed frm the library but is there anything else that it is going to enable us to do? Is there a list somewhere of what functions are going to be available?

** she thinks to herself....boy, what a dodo I sound like SIGH**

409: Well, if you're a dodo then so am I. So far as I know there is no such list. Those extra functions will be a surprise for all of us.

We should make such a list of the known functionality, and then when stuff shows up that's not on the list, we can be all excited and pleased.

1. Currently-reading functionality
2. The ability to not count books in some collections against our total number of books
3. The ability to not have books in some collections count toward recommendations.

It's been fairly clear that release 1.0 of Collections will have some movement toward #1. I don't know if anything's been explicitly stated about #2 and #3, but it's been heavily assumed Collections will address them.

There is no list, per se.

You are correct in that the actual Collections feature will allow you to break your catalog/library into different containers called collections.

Your catalog view will allow you to view one container at a time or view "All collections" which means every item that you have cataloged, regardless of what collection it is in (including wishlists). The "All collections" view is analogous to what we have now.

That's the basics of what Collections are. But there are a lot of things that come with that such as a new Favorites feature and a new Currently Reading feature. Both of which are "collections" in the broad sense but they have special behaviors attached to them.

I also came up with a few new UI elements that will be debuting on the site when we launch Collections. There will be a standard button style used and a menu UI was needed to handle collection picking so that too will be launched. Some people had a free preview of the button UI when somebody accidentally pushed some changes to the Add Books page the other day. Response was good so I'm hoping that that holds true.

There are also going to be changes in the way that recommendations and user connections are handled because you will be able to control those things on a per collection basis. So things in your wishlist won't be factored in to recommendations, for instance (or they will, depending on your settings for that collection). Every person can have their own settings for every collection, including the default collections.

I think that we have 5 default collections right now but we are debating those on a daily basis to make sure they are the right fit for a majority of our members.

You will also be able to hide/disable any collections (including default collections) that you don't want or use.

You will be able to create your own collections. Right now we are not limiting the number of collections.

Work/Book pages have been slightly redesigned to deal with collections.

The same for the Add Books page.

Obviously the catalog page has gone through some heavy work but the only major visual changes will be to the top catalog navigation bar in on that page (we call it the powerbar).

The "Tags" page has been renamed "Organize" and will have some really cool new features dealing with Collections and Tags and moving things back and forth between the two.

I mentioned Currently Reading above. The entire CR system has been reworked to make it easier to use. We are aiming to make LT easier to use for the casual users out there.

Those are the basics but there are a lot of things that have to happen to get those things working across every page on the site in a seamless manner. I've probably missed a few new features too. There are a lot of them.

4. Wishlists

which will participate in #2 and #3 (hopefully on a buy-in basis).

hopefully, the ability to have a "private" section in one's library - but I'm not sure any more if that's a "right away" part of collections or an "incremental" part...

>414 staffordcastle:

But does a wishlist really have any meaningful functionality of its own apart from #2 and #3? (Maybe it does and I'm just not thinking of something.)

413>

We are aiming to make LT easier to use for the casual users out there.

I hope you find a way to do that without taking away functionality that's important to the power users! It's the rich functionality of LT that's the major draw for many of us.

>415 gwernin:

That's a good one that I missed! That's one that I'm really looking forward to.

> 413.

See, "TormentDawg" !

Honestly, it's not nice to get us so worked up before dinner and a long evening in front of the computer ... staring forlornly at the Collections-less screen.

"Organize" sounds exciting. And a nice solution to Tim's Tag-Tab Torment.

413: Oho, that sounds a little like a list after all. Sounds good.

Is the new Favorites feature about individual books?

415: I'm hoping for that too, but I'm not expecting it to be there from the start.

>416 Alixtii:

Yes. Some people (the ones who don't put any books in their libraries that they don't own) would want their wishlist not to count toward their numbers, or influence their recommendations. Others may not care about either consideration.

Myself, I would want it not to count toward my total number of books, but would want it to count toward recommendations; to my mind, a book I want but haven't acquired yet demonstrates my interest in a subject just as much as one I already own. Others don't feel that way, as has been demonstrated in various threads discussing collections.

Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations :-)

>421 staffordcastle:

But what would the extra functionality be, beyond the ability to add to the total number (or not) or influence recommendations (or not), which would be equally true of any collection? What could a "Wishlist" collection do that a "Children's Literature" collection couldn't?

Live long and prosper.

>2 DaynaRT:. The ability to not count books in some collections against our total number of books

Your profile is going to list "books cataloged" as a total number. Then, right below, it will have "Collections:" and your collections, each with a number.

>3 readafew:. The ability to not have books in some collections count toward recommendations.

Yes. In release 1. I think that they it should never recommend a book that is on ANY of your lists, though. So, wishlists shouldn't count toward recommendations, if you don't want them to, but you also shouldn't be told to buy things on your wishlist...

>Private library

Not in release 1. The main problem is that when you set collection-level things, what happens when a book participates in two collections? For example, you put "Kama Sutra at Work" into your "Office Affair" collection and assume it will be private, but it's also in your "At the Office" collection.

I think privacy is, ultimately, a book-level thing. But I'm open to discussion.

424a:
Okay. I wonder if we'll have a way to edit which collections are shown on the profile?

b. Yes, exactly.

c. Private overrules everything?

424, 425: I'd expect privacy to be book-level and overrule everything. You can see "Kama Sutra at Work" in your "At the Office" collection but no one else can even if "At the Office" is a public collection.

>Okay. I wonder if we'll have a way to edit which collections are shown on the profile?

You can hide collections, but the list is all those you're using.

>b

Good.

>c

Not in release 1.

You will be able to hide/disable collections. If you disable a collection it is not deleted but instead it just isn't shown in any collection listings, menus, etc. In this way you can have project-oriented collections that you may use every once in a while but you don't want to see them on a daily basis.

We won't have "private" when we launch Collections. We do plan to offer it but just not at launch time.

>422 Alixtii: I'm not sure if - at least initially - the idea is to have wishlists have extra functionality. It seems to me the idea is to be able to put wishlists in a separate bucket (a collection) that operates differently (if the user wants it to) than the rest of a user's LT collections. I'm sure over time there will be several great ideas and recommendations about how to use the wishlist functionality differently than other collections. But to start, I'm just excited to be able to have a wishlist on LT, in my account, that I can set up to not count toward book recommendations. It will finally bring all my book lists under one roof - the LT roof.

ETA: Wow, everyone types faster than I do!

Chris,
Thanks for that very involved explanation/list/response. I think that it gives me a better idea of what everybody is clamoring about.

FMI - does UI mean User Interface?

417 >> I can't believe that the programmers would forfeit functionality for theconvenience of the basic user. If it is easier for the basic user, it should be okay for the "poweruser".

FMI - What makes a poweruser?

ETA - I tried to turn off italics but its coming from above.

</i>
430>

I can't believe that the programmers would forfeit functionality for the basic user. If it is easier for the basic user, it should be okay for the "poweruser".

That's not necessarily a safe assumption.

As an example -- and to be fair, I don't think this is one they're actually considering -- eliminating the use of library sources, and going to the Amazon-only model used by their competitors, would certainly make things easier for the "casual user", who no longer would have to deal with choosing a source. Sweeping editions under the rug, and just going to a title+author model, would go even farther in that direction, and mean "casual users" wouldn't have to deal with picking from the many results they get on a title+author search. Both of these would clearly be horribly bad for power users, who care about data and want to be able to get their book added correctly.

(Power user == someone familiar and comfortable with the site's features.)

Edited to fix stray italic tag from the previous post

</i>
(Closing a rogue italics tag)
433 - you beat me to it!

431>>> Gee I guess that makes me a power user....

** she scratches her head, and thinks " just feeling comfortable with the site's features doesn't seem like a good critieria, I must still be missing something" oh,well, I'll just go with the flow. SIGH**

I have to say that I'm disappointed that all collections will included in a total of books cataloged. This means I will not be using the wish list at all or creating lists which have books I don't own. :-(

"All Collections" will contain all books ever cataloged but "Your Library" will contain only those items that you consider part of your actual library (so wishlist items can be removed, for example).

You'll be shown separate book counts for each collection.

And no. We absolutely are not sacrificing any power features for the sake of ease of use. It's a real challenge.

>I have to say that I'm disappointed that all collections will included in a total of books cataloged. This means I will not be using the wish list at all or creating lists which have books I don't own. :-(

It's a number. Come up with a term for it, if you want. At some level, we want to keep track of all books you have in your account in any way whatsoever.

Doesn't matter what you call it. If imaginary books are being added to my total , then its not something I will use. No wishlist for me.

Its why I also didn't create or use a wishlist shelf on Goodreads. The book ends up in the All shelf mixed with those I own. Not acceptable for me.

Meh. I was looking forward to not counting my wishlist OR to-be-read in the total number. It simply doesn't make sense to count them, especially if I don't really consider them part of "my" library. I catalogue them for completeness, and to keep things organized, but that doesn't mean I want them counted as a part of my library.

Also:
427: >Okay. I wonder if we'll have a way to edit which collections are shown on the profile?
You can hide collections, but the list is all those you're using.

..... Oh flip, I don't know if I even want to get into this, since it won't be released right away.... but *when* we get the privacy-functionality, IF we are able to make whole collections private, will they still show up on our profile?

413: *hyperventilates!!* Eeeeeeepppp!! Sounds soooo awesometastic!!

..... So, is Collections going to be pushed in the middle of the week, so we don't totally break the site by everyone clammering to use it at once, or on a weekend, so we don't all flail around because we're at work and can't see the spiffyness? lol

Meh. I was looking forward to not counting my wishlist OR to-be-read in the total number. It simply doesn't make sense to count them, especially if I don't really consider them part of "my" library.

I think you'll be fine then - Chris specifically said that they wouldn't be counted in your library see post #435.

439: Yes, but Tim said in msg 424: Your profile is going to list "books cataloged" as a total number. Then, right below, it will have "Collections:" and your collections, each with a number.

Right. You will see separate counts for each of your collections. Here's a screenshot of Tim's new Organize page, for instance:

>440 Heather19:
One of the "groupings" (notice I'm not using the term "your library" since the meaning has become blurred) has always been "everything you've added to LT" - everything attached to your user name in any way. This number must include wishlist by its nature. It is the base pool from which other groupings are separated out. This is what Tim meant by "books cataloged," if I understand correctly.

I have been holding my breath for collections intermittantly for a while but I have to jump in and add...

YIPPEE!

The current conversation has re-invigorated my "collections" lust.

Re: the collections themselves ... I will have to play around and see what suits my needs, right now I am thinking:

All Collections - no problem here - this contains every single book/work I have attached to my LT account. (will be larger than my current LT number as will include my "Wishlist" collection which is currently on BookMooch)

Your Library - If possible I will use this for actual physical books in my library (not wishlist, not "do not own"= dno tag, not inclusion tag)

WishList - will contain generic editions (manually entered and combined if necessary) of the books currently on my BM wishlist

Favorites - will have books currently tagged favorite and most favorite
-- curious to see what additional functionality might be associated with this...

To Read - if this is a default collection I will probably assign TBR and "Owned but not read" (currently not designated by tag - "reverse-shelved" in my physical library)

(Currently Reading - doubtful I would use this; so will hide/delete if possible)

Read but Un-Owned - just what it says - will include books that have dno tag but NOT unread tag

I would probably have the following "User-Defined" Collections:

Withdrawn - books I have had in my possession that I don't anymore

NOT MINE - books that have come into my possession that don't reflect my reading tastes ("Angel"-mooches, family rejects, unread gifts)

....more (will have to consider...)

Nice! A screenshot! Looks great!
And you can jump to sections real quick by clicking the down arrows on the menu at the top?
And are the brown boxes the automatic collections and the green user-created?
I'm so excited now! You're too mean!
(Even got me to post my first message in this topic)

>Doesn't matter what you call it. If imaginary books are being added to my total , then its not something I will use. No wishlist for me. Its why I also didn't create or use a wishlist shelf on Goodreads. The book ends up in the All shelf mixed with those I own. Not acceptable for me.

What if on the stats page in small grey type at the bottom it says "FicusFan has X books in every collection, tadah!" Maybe only on the German version on Sunday?

How about "X in all collections"? Acceptable? My main interest, incidentally, is in giving people a number they can watch--both so they can monitor progress across all areas and so that they can know when they need to buy a paid account. (We may bump the 200 up, but we're going to have a number.)

>One of the "groupings" (notice I'm not using the term "your library" since the meaning has become blurred) has always been "everything you've added to LT" - everything attached to your user name in any way. This number must include wishlist by its nature. It is the base pool from which other groupings are separated out. This is what Tim meant by "books cataloged," if I understand correctly.

We're going to start by separating books by tag. Anything tagged "wishlist" (or any one of the variants) will be thrown into the wishlist collection. We'll do that for the others too. When thrown into wishlist, they will be taken out of "Your library."

You'll be free to move them around, and to add books however you please, obviously.

We're going to resolve the "your library" name problem by renaming the tag "your library" into "your books." "Your Library" will thus be a default collection, and nothing else.

Here's the profile, as it stands now, with a mishmash of blue and purple links because i've been clicking:

Should "your library" become "my library," or just "library," If it's on the profile, where other people see it?

The screenshot looks great. Having a different total for All Collections and Your Library seems very logical and will surely keep all but the most hard-core separatists happy.

>445 timspalding:
Sunday? This Sunday?

Now you are really going to have a lot of LT members on the edge of their seats!

Can't wait to play with Collections.

Looks great! Did someone say sunday, where did sunday come from?

Maybe we can cheat already? By pre-tagging? Tag a book wishlist and ka-pling it will be in the wishlist collection when collections are launched right?

Anything else? Can I start tagging books with whatever tag I want and it will be easy to transfer it to a collection later?

We're going to resolve the "your library" name problem by renaming the tag "your library" into "your books." "Your Library" will thus be a default collection, and nothing else.

I don't understand what you're saying here. What tag?

Message 445: timspalding
>Doesn't matter what you call it. If imaginary books are being added to my total , then its not something I will use. No wishlist for me. Its why I also didn't create or use a wishlist shelf on Goodreads. The book ends up in the All shelf mixed with those I own. Not acceptable for me.


What if on the stats page in small grey type at the bottom it says "FicusFan has X books in every collection, tadah!" Maybe only on the German version on Sunday?

Hey you can do anything you want in German and its fine with me :)


How about "X in all collections"? Acceptable? My main interest, incidentally, is in giving people a number they can watch--both so they can monitor progress across all areas and so that they can know when they need to buy a paid account. (We may bump the 200 up, but we're going to have a number.)

Saying the total is of all collections is better, but what happens when you click on the collection/folder called All Collections ? Aren't the books from the wishlist going to be there ? So I have books I don't own mixed with books I do. Will there be a notation that the wishlist books are from the wishlist, or will they just be there like Your Library looks now ?

You are going to move my books around by Tag. NO. NO. NO I don't want anything in my Library touched or moved. If I want to use collections I will, that isn't a given. If you separate them I will only have to move them back.

>455 Collectorator: Oh, that makes sense, thanks!

what happens when you click on the collection/folder called All Collections ? Aren't the books from the wishlist going to be there ? So I have books I don't own mixed with books I do.

I long ago decided that I don't really need a wishlist on LT, but I'm glad to see some people are still concerned with the issue that I tried so hard to explain before :)

Yeah. I have become resigned to not using Wishlist here either. But I thought I would ask.

456, 457: I'm in the opposite camp. I'll start a wishlist once we have collections and thus a clear way to separate my books (which for me is books physically in my possession) from not my books.

456 & 457

Yeah, but I was hoping to be able to have books I have read have gotten rid of in a collection, but if it will show up as part of 'my library" that's a no go.

458: And then some books will be in my library and in wishlist (another copy in better condition, different cover, etc.)

459: They won't show up in "Your Library" (if that's what you want) but they will show up in All Collections. All of your collections are included in All Collections, that's pretty much the point. You don't have to click on it if you don't want to.

Tim's example shows "read but not owned" showing up in "your library"

Perhaps Tim has chosen to include his "read but not owned" books in his "your library" collection.

See messages 19 and 435.

I'm pretty much in the "I have to own it to catalog it" camp and I'm pretty sure I'm going to have a "wishlist" collection and a "I got it from the public library" collection. As long as I can separate them into separate lists or collections there isn't really a problem with an "All Collections" list as far as I can see.

A suggestion. It might be better to not make 'All Collections' so prominent. Possibly move it to the bottom of the list as show in 441.

456 & 457 > won't your concerns be resolved by being able to hide the "all collections" collection ???

for tim's purposes of making users aware if they're hitting the 200 (or other) threshold, maybe when "all collections" are hidden there could be a note (as he suggests) at the bottom of the profile that says: "n books included in your account; (200 – n) left at this account level" or something like that.

Tim or CD -

Do you have a shot of a person's full list of books would look like with collections? Basically, I wanted to be a total lookie-loo and not just look at someone's physical library and wanted to look at their whole universe, what does that look like with collections visible?

Maybe that will clear up things for folks? Assuming, of course, they haven't done something crazy like include a book both in an included and non-included collection...

>467 lquilter: "n books included in your account"

I think that's a great label to use for this number. It makes no statement whatsoever how you're qualifying the book--you cataloged it because you own it, or you entered it because you wanted to write a review.

If I can hide All Collections so it isn't able to be clicked on and seen or browsed, then yes I can live with it.

I understand that LT needs to keep track of the number of total books for free/not free, but if there is a way to indicate that it is from all collections, and not a 'book' total I can live with that.

I do have a question about the wishlist books that I haven't seen asked.

Wishlist would be books that are out of print, books that are in print, and books that have yet to be published.

If you didn't enter the book manually you would have to take what you could get from the web for out of print book, and in print books you could get anywhere.

What about those that have yet to be published ?

I can find the stubs on Amazon (title, author, ISBN), but often there is very little info and no cover. Eventually the data is filled in closer to the pub date. However, if we add the stub, are we going to have to add all the new data by hand (how will the green stuff get there ?). Or do we have to delete the old entry, and add the new one with all the new data. Or will there be some kind of 'update' button ?

Here are some pics of the catalog. The icons on the right are still in progress, as are small details about the collections column but you can get the idea of what things will look like from these.

With All Collections selected.


Shown with the collection menu open...

Oh...I won't be answering any more posts today. Traveling.
Sorry.

Ah - so 2 pages disappeared from your library by switching from All Collections to Your Library - and those would be collections you don't consider part of your library!

(so I haven't gotten in the car yet)
Right. I have various books in my Wishlist collection that aren't in my Your Library collection.

Note to self: I really need to actually start cataloging more of my books that are in storage. But that would mean less time programming. Ah, maybe later. ;)

You should get one of those CueCats - I hear there are extras - and they keep zombies at bay! Plus, you seem to have an in with that Tim fellow, I bet he'd give you a discount.

;)

Safe Travels.

Those look awesome! My excitement, it is a lot!

VERY excited, and wish everyone would stop complaining about this and that thing. Collections, people!! Finally!!!!!

474> FlashMob at ConceptDawg's!

Looks great! Did someone say sunday, where did sunday come from?

A joke, see 445: "What if on the stats page in small grey type at the bottom it says "FicusFan has X books in every collection, tadah!" Maybe only on the German version on Sunday?"

We're going to resolve the "your library" name problem by renaming the tag "your library" into "your books." "Your Library" will thus be a default collection, and nothing else.

Sorry tag -> tab. Apologies.

You are going to move my books around by Tag. NO. NO. NO I don't want anything in my Library touched or moved. If I want to use collections I will, that isn't a given. If you separate them I will only have to move them back.

You will be able to move them back easily. It is a fair starting assumption that people who tag books "wish list" will want their books in the "wish list" collection. Needless to say, the tags will not be changed.

Yeah, but I was hoping to be able to have books I have read have gotten rid of in a collection, but if it will show up as part of 'my library" that's a no go.

"Your library" can include anything you want. If you want a "Got rid of" collection, more power to you!

Perhaps Tim has chosen to include his "read but not owned" books in his "your library" collection.

Right. I'll be doing that. Other people don't need to.

A suggestion. It might be better to not make 'All Collections' so prominent. Possibly move it to the bottom of the list as show in 441.

Yes, I'd consider that. We are also planning to add a few "automatic" collections—collections that you can't directly add things to, like "Recently added books" and "Reviewed books." You'll be able to turn them off, if you don't find them useful. They will have a different icon. "All collections" could be one of those, since it isn't really a collection, but a omnigatherum automatically generated.

>478 PhoenixTerran:

No, we're doing me first. Katya has already offered.

may I just ask...if you can say...what's the LATEST that we can expect Collections? So I can stop being so paranoid and checking LT every 5 secs just for that?

It's not going to happen in the next seven days. Our feature/bug list is about ten items.

481 > minimum time is 2 weeks from last Monday.

480 > I didn't think Katya was that kind of girl...

Re: Moving

I don't have any wishlist tags so that won't affect me. Is that all the moving you are doing or are you moving TBR, Read and any other tags ? Are the books you are moving going to disappear from the My Library tab/view or will they be in the old place and the new collection ?

I am happy with how my books are now, and yes I can move everything back, but I would rather not have to if that can be avoided without disrupting others.

477> Agreed! (bouncing up and down, grinning uncontrollably).

I just got a heading called Your Collections on my home page and a bunch of error

Warning: include(ajax_home_collections.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/html/inc_home.php on line 715 Warning: include(): Failed opening 'ajax_home_collections.php' for inclusion (include_path='/var/www/html:.:/php/includes') in /var/www/html/inc_home.php on line 715

484> Perhaps you could temporarily change you Wishlist tag to Listwish or something until after Collections makes its debut.

I don't have any wishlist tags. I don't have any books cataloged that I don't own. I just want to know if they are moving other tags as well.

>487 FicusFan: I'm seeing this too.

The Collections escaped! Quick, catch them before they scatter to the four winds!

491: no, no, don't panic, I think it's only a lone escapee ;-)

cDawg, come back quick, one of your pets is loose!

481>

what's the LATEST that we can expect Collections?

Never, clearly.

I think maybe you meant to ask about the earliest? In which case the answer would, almost certainly, be "two weeks"?

Any thoughts about using Your Catalog for everything including vaporware and leaving Your Library as the descriptor for things owned? It makes way more sense to me so I thought I'd throw it out there. To me a Library is a collection of physical objects available to reference. If I went into my town library and they had a bunch of stuff they'd seen once in a dream listed as acquisitions, I'd be pretty pissed.

491: phew, looks like they caught it ;-)

CD &Tim, cover your ears! (or, well, your eyes actually)

No, when I said the latest I actually meant the latest. I know the earliest is two weeks. But, see, if we can just trick Tim or ConceptDawg into saying "ok guys, Collections is gonna be done on/before the first week of May, at the LATEST" and they're not, then we can break into their house at night and throttle them WITHOUT being blamed for murder, right?? I mean, that's only fair, no? :)

#494
If I went into my town library and they had a bunch of stuff they'd seen once in a dream listed as acquisitions, I'd be pretty pissed.

Shame on you, logic has no place in this discussion. (/sarcasm)

#494 Any thoughts about using Your Catalog for everything including vaporware and leaving Your Library as the descriptor for things owned?

So basically you're suggesting changing "All Collections" to "Your Catalogue"?

You'll be able to turn them off, if you don't find them useful. They will have a different icon. "All collections" could be one of those

The ability to turn off All Collections would make me very happy!

Looking at the nice drop-down of named collections, are you planning to do anything like that for display styles? It would be nice to have more than 5, and to be able to name them.

You can't turn that off because otherwise there's no way LT can tell how many books you have in total, and they need to know because there has to be a limit to how many you can add with a free account.

Maybe what you should ask for is the ability to hide it from the people who view your page? I mean what do you care if it's there as long as you look at your books the way you want and people see your profile the way you want them to? (i.e. not at ALL your books together)

I'm not really sure 498. One post says everything including things you might have read when you were 9 is going to be called Your Library and others say All Collections. I guess it's not decided which is why I put my oar in. All Collections makes more sense than Your Library though.

Looking at the nice drop-down of named collections, are you planning to do anything like that for display styles? It would be nice to have more than 5, and to be able to name them.

I agree that would be cool. The main sticking point is the UI for making them. We have a nifty UI for arranging things vertically—seen on the home page, for example. Horizontal arranging is tougher. The current menu-based on works, but it's ugly and not, I think, totally obvious.

#500,

Turning off All Collections for the viewing public is not the same as preventing LT from getting or keeping a count of what we have.

Turning off means not showing, it doesn't mean it won't be there or won't function as the others do.

>500 girlunderglass: I think this is mostly just semantics. I thought turning off a collection meant hiding it from view. All the turned-off default collections still have to be there somewhere, and be accessible from the Collections-editing page, so that people can use them later if they change their mind.

>502 timspalding: I'm not entirely sure where horizontal comes in here. More than 5 display styles would take up more vertical space, not more horizontal space, in the edit-display page. So the page would remain as ugly as it is now, but it wouldn't be any worse.

*WAY. TOO. EXCITED!!*

446: Okay, some explaining/clearing up on something, please? "We're going to start by separating books by tag. Anything tagged "wishlist" (or any one of the variants) will be thrown into the wishlist collection. We'll do that for the others too."

That doesn't mean that all of my tags are going to automatically become collections when this debutes, does it? I mean, I have maybe 2 tags that I'd want to make into Collections, the rest I don't, and I certainly wouldn't want them all to be converted to collections.

471: *SQUEEEE!* Looks so purty and easy and organized!

Just want to make it clear, because it seems like this might be a problem: I DO NOT WANT MY TAGS MADE INTO COLLECTIONS!!! Pleeeeeease tell me that isn't what you mean!! My library is MINE, if I want certain tags to be collections I will make them that way, I do *NOT* want it done automatically!

494> That's essentially what they're doing - All Collections is everything you've cataloged (including wishlist, to-be-published, books-I'm-going-to-write if you want...). My Library is everything you've cataloged MINUS any collections you mark as Don't Include - so put Don't Include on your wishlist, DNO, anything else that's 'vaporware' to you and My Library will contain only your physical books. That's probably what I'd do - while I have a lot of discarded books and library books and the like cataloged, it's very useful to be able to see what I physically have in the house. But sometimes I want to be able to see, say, all books I've read...so I'd have to have a collection that included unowned (and some wishlist - books I borrowed, read, and decided I wanted to own). I might make that My Library or I might have a separate collection. I'll see, when the real thing shows up.

Hiding All Collections - yay! Relief for the separatists! It's not a problem to me - I'd find it valuable to be able to see everything I've cataloged, all combined - but I can see FicusFan's and _Zoe_'s point (with a little mental stretching).

And there's always the problem of private collections (when that gets implemented) - are those books going to show up in All Collections? If not, it's not All Collections; if so, they're not private. Hmmm. Two solutions spring to mind - either a) if there are private books in All Collections, AC is private; or b) mask private books in All Collections (the line shows (private book) for all elements). That way it's counted but not displayed. The only thing it would show is number of books, and we can see that on a private library now (I think - can't find any private members to check!). And the third option - auto-hide AC if there's private books in it. Not as good - either of the others would make me happier - but it would solve the immediate problem. And just in general, being able to hide collections that are not used or that I don't want to see or be seen sounds like an excellent idea to me.

505> From what they've said here and elsewhere - not all tags, by a long shot. Just a few that will generally denote collections - the only one they've mentioned currently is Wishlist (and wish list, wishlist, @Wishlist, etc). I suspect they'll ask as they get closer to the release if there are any other tags that _should_ be made into automatic collections (in which case, if the consensus is that X should be and you don't want it, you change your X to something else...). Or maybe they'll just do Wishlist. That one's pretty firm.

eta tags to collections

#503>

Turning off All Collections for the viewing public is not the same as preventing LT from getting or keeping a count of what we have.

Turning off means not showing, it doesn't mean it won't be there or won't function as the others do.

LT *has* to be able to keep a count of what you have, if for no other reason than that it has to know if you're at 200 for a free account.

If they promised to never, ever, reveal this to anyone anywhere, would you still be so upset by it?

>507 lorax: I think you're creating a problem out of nothing. As far as I know, no one has an issue with the collection existing as long as it can be hidden from everyone.

Let me recap the conversation:
I said I'd be happy with the ability to "turn off" All Books.
Girlunderglass said that that wouldn't be possible because LT has to count books.
FicusFan said that "turning off" means hiding and wouldn't prevent counting.
I said that "turning off" means hiding and wouldn't prevent counting.
You said... that counting is necessary, and asked whether hiding would be enough. I'm not seeing the disagreement here....

# 507 ?

You are simply restating my post, in which I say that LT will always have an accurate count.

I am not upset, I simply don't want bogus information associated with my account. I am already a paid lifetime member so there is no issue with paid/free threshold.

I only catalog books I own. I don't see the purpose of hacking my library up to shove certain books into smaller containers. Tagging them works just as well, and they are all in the same place.

The only books I want to keep completely separate are books I don't own. So I don't really care about collections, other than the idea of a wishlist.

Adding vaporware books and or counts to my catalog is distasteful. Mixing them is unacceptable. To me. I am not asking anyone else to function the way I do. I simply want to be able to opt out or turn off features that do not meet my needs.

If there is no way around it, I just won't use the wishlist function.

On the All Collections point -

While I personally don't mind if people can see my "All Collections" or how many total books I've cataloged across all my collections....

for those who are concerned about this, it seems that there are 2 relevant questions that shouldn't get conflated:
1) Whether it will be possible to make All Collections hidden in the catalog, so that no one can click on it and see all your books lumped together.
2) Whether the total number of all books in All Collections will be shown publicly anywhere on the profile (as opposed to the private homepage, or somewhere else in account information, for those who don't want it shown publicly).

It's not clear to me from the previous posts that "turning off" All Books in (1), necessarily implies 2. So, the discussion is getting a little confusing.

Question from #466, and Tim's reply in #479:

A suggestion. It might be better to not make 'All Collections' so prominent. Possibly move it to the bottom of the list as show in 441.

Yes, I'd consider that. We are also planning to add a few "automatic" collections—collections that you can't directly add things to, like "Recently added books" and "Reviewed books." You'll be able to turn them off, if you don't find them useful. They will have a different icon. "All collections" could be one of those, since it isn't really a collection, but a omnigatherum automatically generated.

As a couple others have said, I personally don't have a problem with my "All Collections" being visible, though it makes good sense to give users the option to hide it. But I REALLY like Tim's statement here, about maybe moving it to the bottom, and/or identifying it as an "omnigatherum automatically generated." It really isn't a "collection," just the total number of items linked with a given user's account. Could you just call it "Omnigatherum"...or something like that? Just thinking aloud... ;-)

I got a fit of the giggles envisioning a bunch of elderly men in funny hats and all manner of strange regalia carrying out silly ceremonies to the greater glory of the Mighty Omnigatherum!

Surprisingly, to me anyway, it gets 1,170 Google hits, including The Bibliothecary

No offense meant here but I'm going to say it anyway...

I love debating this stuff in public as much as the next guy and we try to give members a chance to put in their 2 cents worth.

But at this point in the game I'm not going to be doing any major changes to the overall design of the Collections system until we launch. Again, I appreciate the feedback but try and use the system before making any decisions about it. I've seen too many "well I'm just not going to use it" type comments already. That's pretty asinine when you think about it: to make that decision based on a few development screenshots. Use it for a few days before hating it. That's only fair.

Mostly though, if we start making major changes at this stage it's quite possible that I'm going to quit LibraryThing, take my ball, and go home. And I'm only half kidding there.

I'm launching this feature, you're going to use it, and you're going to like it. So there. :)

>513 conceptDawg: - cD,

Honey...darling...sweetie -- please, Please, PLEASE! do not let the heckling of minority, yet vociferous, naysayers who have (to steal my mother's favorite phrase) "the unmitigated gall" to criticize a feature that they have NEVER EVEN SEEN LIVE to drive you to even contemplate leaving the LT fold! (Tim - don't you let him do it! Give him a Pony or something...)

Opinionated people like to have opinions (I should know, I am one of them!) (PortiaLong feels a quoting moment coming on..."Opinions....Assholes"....).

SO, they "aren't going to use it"? Oh...so sad...wait let me find a tear or two (wait - I used them all up on those 3AM ASPCA sad puppy-dog commercials). DUDE! It is THEIR LOSS! They could have explored the feature when released and recognized the awesome expanded functionality you offered them and contributed constructive criticism at that point but NO they decided, sight unseen, that they didn't like THAT particular pony because it was brown instead of appaloosa?!!

You tell 'em Chris! I agree with PortiaLong (there's a first!), but I'm not going to call you sweetie... Unless it would help.

514: No no no, I rejected that pony because it wasn't *white*! :P

Seriously, though, yeah. Chris, love ya man. We all could use a little step backwards, I think, sometimes. We won't know how we feel about it unless we try it!

I appreciate the feedback but try and use the system before making any decisions about it.

Amen. Curiosity is understandable, but criticism at this stage of the proceedings is both impractical and unjust.

Perhaps I should have said this earlier, but my first reaction to your mention of "GREAT projects" to work on after Collections was to think how refreshing that must be to look forward to; and to hope you'd have fun with whatever it was and not tell us too much, so that you wouldn't have to work under pressure of lengthy clamouring again.

{edited for grammar}

The "my collections must NOT be seen together" issue is played out. I have a good idea of the depth of the feeling here, but also of the (small) number of people who care, of the greater number who don't, and the weirdness of tying ourselves in knots about the functioning of a feature that isn't rolled out.

Here's a recent catalog-icon shot. Collections got bound up in redoing how we do buttons and icons, so here it is. The icon is a box. At least people know what a box is. :)

http://www.librarything.com/pics/blog/newcatalog.jpg

I suspect some members will think it too candy-colored. I think, in context, it's about as colorful as Microsoft Excel. But we can debate it. The basic structure is set, however. I might desaturate the image or change an icon, if nec. before we go live, but mostly I want to avoid dickering with it. We have all the time in the world to change icons after we launch.

Techies will be interested that we are using "CSS-sprites," loading a single image for all of the icons and looking at it through a keyhole. The sprite file, which includes all sorts of junk now, is here: http://www.librarything.com/pics/spr/c.gif

A Nabokov said, letting people see your rough drafts is "like passing around samples of one’s sputum."

I'm sorry, I gotta ask -- what are the meanings of the four differently-colored tags? -- Organize blue? Organize brown?

Just trying out colors.

519> I suspect some members will think it too candy-colored.

Perhaps, but it looks good to me. More sophisticated, I think, than the old powerbar--yet both the layout and color scheme are in keeping with what we already find familiar...

A-ha! I just found this, posted by Tim in another topic less than 2 hours ago:

we intend to get Collections 1.0 out in the next week or so

Yay! *runs off to start preparing her Collections launch party*

Chris, I hope Tim gives you a nice long vacation after this.

I really didn't intend to cause any trouble this time. But at the same time, I know that if there were something I was concerned about and other people shared my views, I would want them to say something rather than remain silent because they'd already given up.

I don't really see where you're seeing so much demand for major changes and general "I'm not going to use it" comments, though. The issue of whether All Collections can be hidden like other collections seems pretty trivial, and most of that discussion seemed to consist of confusion about what that would entail rather than demands for changes.

I did say that I wasn't planning to have a wish list here, but it wasn't meant to be offensive. I'm still looking forward to Collections and planning to use it, because there are plenty of other things that I want to do with it. I don't remember anyone besides FicusFan saying that they don't intend to use Collections at all, and I certainly don't remember seeing any hatred in this thread.

I know you're under a lot of stress, and I'm sorry if I contributed to it, but I still don't appreciate being called asinine--especially for something so insignificant as not planning to have a wishlist here. Not everyone needs a wishlist. It isn't necessarily a sign of stupidity.

About the new catalogue view: I'm a lot more concerned about the functionality than the colours. The cog next to the display styles doesn't really express "edit" to me. And will we still be able to have a Social Information column that displays all the information that's there now (number of members, reviews, and whether we've written a review)? Because losing easy access to information is just bad.

>519 timspalding: nooo don't change the colors, they're SO PRETTYYYY! :)
(I'm gonna go draw some rainbows and brush my ponytail now)

> I'm gonna go draw some rainbows and brush my ponytail now

We should have a special skin with rainbows and unicorns and where the dot on the "i" of LibraryThing would be a heart.

Oh, yes yes yes!!! :P oooh you know how to make my day Tim!



Signed: Bubbles

Gah!!!! Sugar overload!!!!

Will collections cure blood sugar problems as well? ;-)

529: No. :P

Cure blood sugar problems? Heck, it's gonna end wars and world hunger, blood sugar won't be a problem at all! :P

Did I see a mention of unicorns?? *bounces* hehe

I love the screenshots, they look great. So excited!

To be fair, Chris didn't call *anybody* assinine. He called the tantrum-throwing behavior assinine and I agree with him on this. Some people are making judgements based on little or no information and are also assuming things, which seems to be getting their panties all up in a bunch. Really, in a couple of the posts, the only thing that was missing was a *foot stomp* over something that hasn't even been tried yet to be coupled with what are easily seen as petulant words. But make no mistake, Chris was commenting on the behavior being presented, not casting aspersions about the person writing them.

Most people on here don't come in to intentionally cause distress, but it does happen. Sometimes, we all need to check ourselves and reread what is written with a more objective eye before hitting the Submit button. Text in novels where exposition can be laid out as to intent and expression is great for conveying true meaning. Short posts on a message board, usually, aren't nearly as artfully done.

Sorry, but could you indicate which posts you consider to demonstrate "tantrum-throwing behaviour"? It seems to me that the language used to describe these posts (asinine, heckling, assholes, tantrum-throwing) is a lot more forceful than the posts themselves. I thought the discussion itself seemed pretty civil, especially compared to some other RSI discussions that I've seen in the past.

Also, I disagree with the general idea that it's better to wait until a feature debuts before giving any feedback. I've seen the launch of the new homepage completely overshadowed by the later-undone removal of the Profile tab, and the launch of the new Tags page completely overshadowed by the later-undone removal of the Tags tab. I'm not sure how these were good things; I think it would have been much more desirable to listen to the user concerns ahead of time and then have everyone focused on the new feature itself at launch.

Despite what Chris said, I don't think anyone was demanding major changes. There was some concern about which books would automatically be moved into other collections, but that doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing to ask about, and it seems like precisely the sort of thing that should be discussed beforehand.

As for All Books, it seems like I'm damned no matter what I say. Despite expressing a preference for the ability to hide that collection and explaining how it wouldn't break the site, I've mostly stopped arguing my position and accepted that Collections may not do everything I want. So now I'm criticized for giving up too quickly instead?

Tim, cD-

I am a new user (with a lifetime membership) who is so excited about collections! I am not, nor am I likely to ever be, a power user. I am, however, a power-reader. We have about 3-4K books in the house and I use the libraries extensively (we also purged 1-2K books a couple of years ago). Collections will help me keep track of everything, including books that I want to read but aren't even published yet ;-). I haven't added most my books because I heard about collections and decided to wait for it. I can't wait to see collections and I want to thank you both for LT and collections!

I'm sure it will be great and made ever better by incremental improvements, like the rest of LT. Kudos!!!!

I have every intention of investigating Collections when (and if) it is ever launched. The Currently Reading bells and whistles certainly interest me, but my expectations and excitement at this point is very low. It has been clear from the start that my concerns were considered in the minority, and Collections have been 'coming soon/2 weeks' for so long that for me there really isn't anything left to feel hopeful about.

However, since Goodreads has had from the beginning (albeit in a simpler form), what LT is still unable to produce, I do actually have some experience with the concept.

At the start of the talk here about Collections, I thought I wanted a Collection for all major subjects, to complement tags. My actual experience on Goodreads has shown me that in fact having lots of small groupings of books is pretty useless (to me), and its a lot of work to add the shelves. I can't get around it because GR has no tags, but I don't have to emulate it here.

Due to my actual experience, my expectations for Collections here have been reduced to the wishlist. If the wishlist doesn't meet my needs or can't be tailored to them, then I won't use it. It is a simple unemotional statement of fact.

I have also asked questions that have not been answered or addressed:

I want to know what books are going to be automatically moved. I don't want to log on one morning and find my books scattered all over the place.

I want to know if I do use the wishlist how a non-published book entry like this on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Frostbitten-Women-Otherworld-Book-10/dp/0553806629/ref=wl_...

That translates into a mostly empty entry on LT like this:
http://www.librarything.com/work/6058023/details

Will be updated with the rest of the information when it becomes available ? As far as I know the green data in not user editable. So are we talking an update function, or having to delete and re-add the book ?

These are not difficult questions if the subject had been discussed before by the designers.

I will continue to voice my opinion when the discussion is about what one wants or how one hopes it to work.

Whether I use Collections/wishlist I will survive, the site will survive and Collections will survive.

Aw, why does everything happen when I go off-line for a week (message to self - never leave LT for a week again, never, never!).

It all looks great, I'm just hanging in here waiting for it to go live before commenting. I figure the quirks will appear as we all try and use the feature but right now I'm just super-excited ....

535> I've requested an update function before, in relation to updating Amazon entered books, but Tim doesn't seem to consider it important to put on The List. I don't consider it a feature related to Collections though since it doesn't matter if people used a wishlist tag or collection they will still need to delete the book and re-add it when they actually acquire the book (or fill in the fields they can and not worry about the library-related fields).

OK, on second thought, it would be a neat feature (as a follow-on after Collections has been released) if when transferring a book from the Wishlist collection to another collection that you have the option of it using the title and author from the Wishlist entry, pre-filling the Add Book page, placing the added book in the new collection and deleting the book from the Wishlist collection. (Given all that it does sound like simply updating the empty fields with fields from the added book might be simpler).

An update function like the one you are talking about is in the works. It's a project unrelated to collections though.

Yeah, I don't think there's any necessary connection between collections and an update feature. That feature is, however, very much on our list. The feature we're planning there is actually rather broader than that.

So, any answer on the question of what kinds of tags will automatically become collections?

So, any answer on the question of what kinds of tags will automatically become collections?

The default collections are:

Your library
Currently reading
To read
Wishlist
Read but unowned
Favorites

By default when collections go live everything is going to go into "Your library" except books tagged "Wishlist." Books tagged "Wishlist" will be removed from "Your Library" and put into "Wishlist." Books tagged with other collection names, like "To read" will stay in "Your library" but be added to their collection-equivalent too.

We'll be using all the tag-combination terms, so "wish list" in German will count. Note that all the default collections will be translated on the non-English sites. User-defined collections do not get their names translated.

The edit-page checkboxes will be honored like tags.

There will no doubt be dissenters here. In response I say:

*This is a new feature. We aren't changing anything; we are adding functionality.
*We had to do something, and this is, I think, the best compromise.
*You can change anything you want here, and easily. The "tag" page is turning into "organize," and will allow all sorts of complex moving between tags and collections.

*dances* Sounds awesome!!
So the tag-combination terms will be used, too, so I don't need to change my "To Be Read" tag into "To Read" in order for it to move automatically? Awesome.

Excitement. I haz it. :)

"...and will allow all sorts of complex moving between tags and collections."

Weehee! Sounds fun!

*You can change anything you want here, and easily. The "tag" page is turning into "organize," and will allow all sorts of complex moving between tags and collections.

Will it be possible to define a collection as the union or intersection of certain other collections? (Like, say, if I wanted to create a "Most Books" collection that was everything except Wishlist.)

What's wrong with the predefined "Your Library" (see message 19)? You can specify that certain collections are excluded it (wishlist is given as a common example).

There are other collections that I also want excluded from my library (in particular, childhood books--finally Most Similar Libraries won't be determind by the number of Sweet Valley books they contain!--and books that belonged to my grandmother and don't reflect my interests). But it would still be useful to have another collection that consists of all the books I own or have read, even the ones that I don't want influencing my connections and recommendations.