Make a private book (this is a beta feature)

I added the following book:
Het maanlied van de wolf
door Penina Keen Spinka
Series: Clan van de Wolf (1)

http://www.librarything.nl/work/4414448/edit/65741258

After editing the book the following text:
Make a private book (this is a beta feature) was placed under the source.

Does somebody know what this is and what I have to do?

See this thread. I think it would be wise simply to ignore it until Tim has finished testing it.

They're testing a new feature where you can make books private (before you had to either make your whole library private or public). You can see the discussion here http://www.librarything.com/topic/99361

I personally would wait to use it until they've debugged it some more.

Thanks for telling this. I had never seen it before, I thought I'd done something wrong.

Are there any plans to continue development on this feature?

Who knows? LT has a habit of having half-finished features. It's been long enough now that I'd say this one probably isn't on the radar right now... But you could always ask Tim.

Bump

Do we have this feature?

DON'T USE IT!

It may or may not hide the book from other users. It may or may not hide it from you.

It's really high time it was deleted.

Well I used it today and it didnt hide anything

>9 sydney.rigpa: It wouldn’t hide it from you. Did you ask someone else if they can see it in your catalog?

>10 2wonderY:

I tried using a private window (not logged in to LT). I searched for a book I added manually, and had ticked Private. Even when not logged in to LT, it showed the book, and showed that it was cataloged by one user, and identified that user as jgoerzen.

>11 jgoerzen: Sometimes it does that. Sometimes it hides it from everyone including the user who added it. Sometimes it does something in between and hides it from you while showing everyone else that you have it. :) It is like Russian roulette. You can use it at your own risk.

>12 AnnieMod: Well that's no good.

I guess I need to consider whether I just make my library completely private. There are downsides to that -- making it harder for others in my family to see it with their own accounts, not being able to participate in conversations about my reviews (I think), etc. Hmm.

>13 jgoerzen: Or you could create a separate account for those books that you want to keep private. There are downsides to that too :-)

>14 bnielsen: I considered that too. Yes, definite downsides to all approaches.

I discovered something particularly disconcerting: having a private catalog doesn't keep my books private either!

I switched my catalog to private yesterday. It took overnight for that to roll out across the site. Today, when not logged in, I can still search for private books that I added and they still show up on the public site! Just not with my name attached.

This is quite unfortunate, because I want to catalog various private books alongside the more public ones. These include memoirs from family members, genealogy works that are limited in distribution or might give away private information about others even in the title, etc. Few of them will ever be relevant to anyone else.

I'm not sure how to resolve this. It's a fairly serious issue for me. Yes, it's less than 1% of the books I'm cataloging, but it's a quite significant thing for me for those 1%.

>15 jgoerzen: Yes, privacy settings do not stop work information from being visible. Even if you are the only person with that book entered, there is still a work which can be seen. There has to be to make the whole database work. The work is not publicly associated with your account. Someone would almost have to know, or at least suspect that it exists to find it. But the work itself is public, just as every other work is.

Remember, the purpose of LibraryThing is to create data for LT's other products. That is what pays the bills. Among the things we do is combining, so that all copies of Tom Sawyer are together, no matter who owns them, in what language, or when the copy was printed. If you enter a book that does not combine into an existing work, the computer does not know if this is really something new or Tom Sawyer in a different language, and if new whether it will stay unique, or just the first copy of the next best seller.

If you do not want the world to be able to find out that these books exist, then you should not enter them in LT.

A workaround might be to enter these books with short titles. 'Genealogy A', with the full title in comments. Still searchable, but not publicly visible as long as the account is private.

>15 jgoerzen: This is because of the structure of the site - we have work level (all copies in all languages and editions) and book level (your individual book). Even when the books are made private by making the catalog that holds them private, the works are always public but the book and your connection to it are only visible to you. Otherwise the site may end up with 20 works for the same book, all private. When a few of them get public, they can be combined and then if one of those libraries become private again, how do you resolve the private/public flag? So you cannot have a private work -- which is what you essentially expected.

I understand that your books are something of little interest of someone else but.. the concept holds. :)

>17 AnnieMod: I guess that makes sense, but it is surprising (my library is private, so that feels like a data leak.)

I think, algorithm-wise, it would make sense to hide a work from the public if:

1. Only one member has it in their library, and
2. That member's library is private

>18 jgoerzen: Your record of it is private, but the work itself is not. Another thing that is not kept private is covers and tags. Again, those would not be linked to your account, but covers are available to others and tags are counted towards global ones. They just show 'private library', instead of pointing to any specific account.

Hiding the work level data seems completely unfeasible to me. It would break the basis of how LT works. In your example, if a private library is the first one to add some book, that record would forever remain its own island, even if many are added afterwards. It would also make it impossible to add works to series and such until it is catalogued by a non-private library, as just two examples.

Works are assumed to be publicly available. If cataloguing something that is not, I'd just keep whatever you feel is sensitive data out of title, cover and tags. It's not very likely someone will stumble on your singleton when you have a private catalogue, but that ensures that nothing sensitive is disclosed even if they do.

>18 jgoerzen: So what happens when you take your library public for a day? Now there is a book. Then you go private - now there isn't one. Caches don't work that way... And what happens if a second user adds the same book? By design, the two books need to go in the same work. But with your plan, they cannot because one or both are private.

I understand what you expect but this is not how the site works. Works are compilations of all copies of the text -- with or without private data attached. But the compilations themselves are always public. You may dislike it but that is the fundamental idea of the site - the public list of works is based on the libraries of the participants.

OK, so thinking this through a bit...

I totally get the LT model of community sourcing quality data (I've participated with combining/splitting works that were incorrectly combined, etc.) Makes total sense.

I worry a bit that things like "Family Photo Album 2008" are going to make things worse for that public data. I know a lot of small libraries also loan out things that aren't media -- board games, museum passes, fishing reels, etc. I imagine TinyCat users have had that sort of thing. Is it going to actively /bother/ anyone if I add private books (family photo album, the book my child made when he was 7 and we printed at Blurb, etc) to LT? Setting aside privacy concerns, I don't want to be a nuisance to LT or the community.

>21 jgoerzen: There are a lot worse things entered in LT than your "Family Photo Album 2008". Perfumes, dresses... Nobody will be upset at the photo album. There are plenty of singletons in LT that are legitimate books, and people are pleased about it. I myself have lots of singletons that will remain so, as the chances that someone else will ever enter another copy is close to null. And there are a few books that I know there is only one copy of. Tim even defends things like Aqua green raw silk so don't worry about your personal books. They are welcome.

And every now and then you get a surprise. My husband's old Slide rule manual is shared with a dozen or so other members.

>21 jgoerzen: The worst thing that can happen is that someone adds their own Photo album with the same title and your books get combined together into one work :)

As >22 MarthaJeanne: mentioned, do not worry. People catalog what they want to -- for example I catalog radio plays I listen to: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/AnnieMod/radioplays (mostly because I want to write reviews and that is the only way) and even separate articles when I want to write some notes about them.

Works like that do not really show up anywhere unless you use a popular author name that puts it on their page (if you are named Charles Dickens and you use that as an author name, these will show up on the author list and may be annoying - so we will need to split and what's not). But just by existing? Most people will never even see them so do not worry at all.

>21 jgoerzen: The worst thing that can happen is that someone will add your family photo album to this list of things we find slightly annoying: https://www.librarything.com/list/99/all/Things-we-wish-were-not-catalog-u-ed-on...

>21 jgoerzen: It appears that 7 members have catalogued this: https://www.librarything.com/work/26456317

>25 Taphophile13: That is almost certainly Amazon searches that went wrong.

>26 MarthaJeanne: Oh, yes. And then there are the lawn mower blade replacements too.

The solution I have implemented for those items that I want to catalogue but that feel too private to be given a public Work page is similar to the one suggested by >16 MarthaJeanne:

A workaround might be to enter these books with short titles. 'Genealogy A', with the full title in comments. Still searchable, but not publicly visible as long as the account is private.

>27 Taphophile13: My lawn mower could use one of those. Where can I download it?

>29 bnielsen: From LT, of course. Just like everyone downloads books.

That list was quite a laugh!! I mean this site is Library Thing after all, and not Library Book...

Theoretically LT could create a companion site where people put crazy stuff like this, and have it connect to LT in a similar-but-not-quite way from the way TinyCat does, and then anything you import from there shows in your library on LT but not in the works. But that would be a very significant amount of work (not just in creating and maintaining, but also in resolving bugs) for the relatively few people who would want to use such a feature... and we would all miss out on the groin clippers and size medium t-shirts of the world. :)

I understand your frustration, but unfortunately there isn't a quick fix that won't cause issues with the way the site fundamentally functions. For the time being this library is private, but some of the books were the first and currently only copies on LT, and those works are still publicly viewable, just not connected to this account. I wouldn't have it any other way.