Where is LT heading?

When I joined LT in November 2008, I was happy. Finally, a way to manage the books I've read. New options for book management and information access were introduced almost weekly.

A lot has changed, especially with the abolition of unlimited usage fees.
With the rise of social media, LT has (in my opinion) increasingly become a social media tool for book lovers.
New applications like TinyCat and others have also been introduced.

Now I feel like LT is at a standstill. It has transitioned to LT 2.0, but this process should be completed at some point.
This transition has changed and improved many things. I'm thinking in particular of adapting the display to different screen sizes and improving LT's localization and usability for non-English speaking users.

But now?
How does management plan further development?
There are so many, some long-standing, items on "our" wish lists. First and foremost, and certainly for a long time, is the complete export and import of our own data.
And…?

I'm excited to see how the journey with LT continues and when we'll reach which milestones next.

Many thanks to all 11 LT employees and the many users who support other users and contribute to improving LT.

ETA: Happy Birthday LT

(Translated with Google Translate)

>1 birder4106:

There is a question about discussions like this. The question is, why should LibraryThing change? Very often (in fact, I think it happens in the majority of cases), when companies change course in search of larger markets, they lose their old market and die. The most important objective for LibraryThing is not to become something new but to be the best cataloguing system it can be.

Could there be improvements within that context? Sure. One that has been discussed at some times, though it is difficult, is a better system for dealing with variations within "works" -- particularly translations or different critical texts. So, for example, the E. Talbot Donaldson translation of Beowulf should be distinct from the Howell D. Chickering text and translation should be distinct from the Klaeber Old English text. I'm not saying they would not all file under Beowulf; I'm just saying that one should be able to gather all Donaldson translations and keep them distinct from Chickering translations, etc.

Again, the J. R. R. Tolkien translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight should be separate from the Marie Boroff translation should be separate from the Middle English edition edition by Tolkien and Gordon.

Or for works of, say, Geoffrey Chaucer, it would be useful to know which books use the Middle English text of W. W. Skeat versus F. N. Robinson versus the Larry D. Benson/Riverside Chaucer edition. This would apply also to, e.g., Shakespeare, or the Greek dramatists, or Josephus, or indeed the Greek Bible.

These are the sorts of changes that would make LibraryThing more and more useful and give it more scope to bring in users.

Beyond that, it might be wise to think about more reliable systems for reviews, book descriptions, etc. -- e.g. one might perhaps have a rating system for reviewers to give an idea of how highly one rates them. (My personal example is user setnakht, https://www.librarything.com/profile/setnahkt, whose reviews of history books are almost always substantial, intelligent, and perceptive; I like to hope that, when I review things, I also meet that standard.) Then one might know which reviewers to turn to first.

One might also hope for some sort of rating of expertise -- when I discuss a book on textual criticism, I very likely know more than anyone else on LT, but I have no expertise on art books whatsoever (except for a lot of technical knowledge about ancient pigments). This might be useful to know in assessing reviews, etc.

But not if it interferes with the cataloguing functions!

Perfect timing on this thread.
Many announcements coming very, very soon.
And I don't mean two weeks this time. Maybe hours. ;)

Two very short weeks.

And there are three new feature announcements coming next week. Well, not all NEW features, but some. Others are updates. And we tried to hit with a fourth but just couldn't get it done. But it's coming very soon too.

And of course we continue to have daily (hourly?) code pushes of fixes and small improvements. Those never stop.

Which we should underscore here that the reason that LT seems like it "doesn't change" is because it's constantly changing. You don't see evolution happening because it's constant. We quite literally are pushing code changes dozens of times a day.

And LT is a HUGE site so we might be changing major things in one corner and it just happens to be a corner of the site that one person don't use much. But for others it's a huge feature.

tbh I really love the Syndetics Unbound that my local library finally switched to this year. (especially after the awful OPAC they had before) I'm very happy about LT development time in that direction, even if it means slower work on the main LT site. 😆

But that's not exactly how the dev time is sorted, lucky for us!

I really must agree with Waltz on this one. My first thought reading this was why fix what isn't broken? I specifically started using this site because I needed a good cataloguing tool for my personal library. I stay here and become invested in the community through some of the additional features, yes, but honestly I think LT is in a pretty good place as it is. Too often companies and organizations try to add something new or even become something new, only to lose that which made them special and popular in the first place.

I'm going to echo much of what has been said already. I'm using Library Thing because it is a good and easy to use catalogue system for my private library. It is not overly complicated and is not trying to be "all things to all people." Features that I call "ancillary" to cataloguing such as Group Talk and Recommendations are helpful and insightful. The Review feature I personally find illuminating (even though some reviews I have read are hardly worthy of being called reviews).

On the whole, other than maybe some tweaking along the margins, I would not ask for radical changes to a good site that is serving its purpose admirably.

I'm not sure what other web sites there even are that I've been on for (almost) twenty years and I am happy with. Just a couple BBSes? (I've been on facebook twenty years but I can't claim to be happy about it anymore.)

Happy birthday, LT! It's been quite the ride.

>1 birder4106: Thanks for starting this conversation. It's clear that Tim and staff have ideas and plans, but we (the users) aren't privy to those conversations. It's good to look at the big picture occasionally.

>5 conceptDawg: Thanks for mentioning that changes are coming soon, and also explaining how changes remain continual but often behind the scenes.

>4 anglemark: LOL

Here's a quick report on some stats.

LibraryThing does not release "real" stats--exact numbers of users/mo, etc. These numbers are metrics of "real" usage—usage of significance. I mean that this doesn't care about 10,000 users arriving and leaving 10 minutes later—they aren't worth anything.

Note that I say "users" here exclusively, not the usual "members." I'm talking about stats and that's what they're called in such conversations.

As you can see, there's no Y axis numbers. I understand that is frustrating. As the Man in Black from the Princess Bride says "Get used to disappointment." I can, however, promise you that the bottom of the Y axis is 0, and that these are raw numbers.



As you can see, usage is up, and trending further up. This is very satisfying to me. LibraryThing's usage is growing.

The same is true for "users who use"—it's growing significantly. We are almost at the 2024 numbers already. But it's hard to project how many more we get, since we can't assume that the number of contributing users will be 50% more because we have four months left. But it's good.

I am less happy about "Talk" post numbers, which are slightly down from 2024 (but above 2022-2023). December is one of the highest usage months, so the numbers may be a little better.



However, when I look at a metric of "reads," the numbers are continuing to rise. This graph is read actions, but it's also true for reading members. That means more members reading talk—but being passive. Growth is good, but passivity is bad.



Another metric shows the problem: Of 100 members who use the site seriously in a year, only 30 read Talk seriously, and 6.5 post to Talk seriously. Now high-use "Talk users" are the strongest, most frequent users. But they are a minority.

It's unclear to me how to think of this. LibraryThing has always been for different types of users. If a user wants to catalog and not socialize, okay. We love you either way. At the same time, I can't help feeling that we are missing out. I want at least some of those people taking an active role in our social life.

>12 timspalding: It's unclear to me how to think of this. LibraryThing has always been for different types of users. If a user wants to catalog and not socialize, okay. We love you either way. At the same time, I can't help feeling that we are missing out. I want at least some of those people taking an active role in our social life.

Hm. Based on number of posts, I surely count as one of your serious Talk users -- but the only groups I'm involved in are Bug Collectors, Combiners, and Talk about LibraryThing. Administrative groups, basically. Not much social activity there. I am extremely active in Common Knowledge and things like that, but again, that's not social. It's more like community service than conversation.

Would I be willing to be more "social"? Probably -- if I could find other people who share my interests. But my interests are academic and abstruse. For example:

Traditional folk music scholarship

Classical textual criticism

Middle English literature, especially the Romances

The relationship between stemmatic fields (cladistics and evolutionary biology, philology, genealogy)

The original Robin Hood legend (i.e. the one in which the king is Edward; in which Will S--- is Will Scathelock, not Will Scarlet(t); in which Robin is based in Barnsdale, not Sherwood; in which Robin is a yeoman, not a hidden earl. There is no Maid Marian, no Friar Tuck, no Alan a Dale, no Earl of Huntington, and no King Richard Yes-and-No who seeks bowmen before the longbow has been invented)

Give me a few minutes and I could probably come up with more (Newfoundland sealing ships, incunabula typefaces, the chemistry of ancient inks ?)

These are all pretty bookish subjects, but if there are other people here interested in those things, I don't know how to find them.

Maybe you need some sort of want ads for interests, or some such. Searchable. Probably with fuzzy search of some sort. I'd like to find those people, assuming they exist (they may not :-), but I don't know how.

>12 timspalding: It's unclear to me how to think of this. LibraryThing has always been for different types of users. If a user wants to catalog and not socialize, okay. We love you either way. At the same time, I can't help feeling that we are missing out. I want at least some of those people taking an active role in our social life.

It’s ironic that you would mention this because lately I’ve been pulling back on Groups. Though I originally came on primarily as a cataloguer, once I got used to the formats and operating protocols of a couple groups, I was all in! At least until recently. At first I was looking at the groups themselves thinking that changes within (moderators, tone, real engagement) had created my disaffection; but the only common denominator is me. It’s challenging to articulate exactly what I’m looking for but something along the lines of, “sometimes I just want to hang out with my friends but not go to a party”. I’ve made friends connections on LT; but outside of messaging, there’s no hangout space. Or a place where I/we can just talk about a book about WWI without having to join a history group. Litsy, in the beginning sort of worked in that way but it’s a different mindset entirely and has its own issues.
Paradoxically but not surprisingly, the less I’m on groups, the more I’m actually reading so I’m not really complaining. ;-)

>13 waltzmn: Middle English literature, especially the Romances

To reinforce your point, I was reading the romances of Chrétien de Troyes recently and posting to a history group (Early Medieval/King Arthur prompt) and… crickets. I would have loved to have been able to talk about the stories with others who also have an interest/expertise in the topic/stories but have no way of finding them. (Or if it is existing feature, it has somehow eluded my attention).

>14 Tanya-dogearedcopy: & >15 Tanya-dogearedcopy: I really like this feedback. It has me thinking about a new feature for LT and I'm going to talk about it with the rest of the staff. We'll see if it germinates.

>15 Tanya-dogearedcopy: >16 conceptDawg:

This is exactly it. I may talk with my friends about things other than the interests we share, but we get to be friends via common interests. And talking about those interests. Forty years' of experience shows that nothing makes me like people who care about things too far removed from what I care about.

So, somehow, we want two things: A way to find people with common interests, and a more social way to talk with them. But the finding has to come first.

I could perhaps talk about @Tanya-dogearedcopy about Arthurian romances, but I suspect we'd have bitter arguments about whether Sir Lancelot should be permitted to be included. :-)

>14 Tanya-dogearedcopy: Paradoxically but not surprisingly, the less I’m on groups, the more I’m actually reading so I’m not really complaining. ;-)

Madam, this site does not want you READING! Words, words, words? It's wasted time!

>18 timspalding:

I would like to say that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is fantastic in translation. But another translation I read did full-on alliterative verse, in imitation of the original, and I find alliterative verse like fingernails on a chalk board!

>18 timspalding: I would like to say that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is fantastic in translation. But another translation I read did full-on alliterative verse, in imitation of the original, and I find alliterative verse like fingernails on a chalk board!

Nitpick: If you found a Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in full alliterative verse, then it's a mistranslation, because SG has alliterative stanzas, but the bob-and-wheel is rhymed. :-p

Still, in your dislike of alliterative verse, you have Geoffrey Chaucer on your side, with his dislike of "rum, ram, ruf." On the other hand, you own The Hobbit, and J. R. R. Tolkien was probably the most successful practitioner of alliterative verse in the last hundred years or so. :-)

What I find is that alliterative verse just doesn't seem to modernize well. I was going to cite Piers Plowman to you, as a book that is obnoxious but sounds quite good -- and the first copy I pulled out was the E. Talbot Donaldson modernization, rather than one of my Middle English editions, and it just doesn't sound the same. If anyone could pull off a modernization, it's Donaldson. So I don't think it's the alliterative verse, it's the modernizations. No one, with the possible exception of Tolkien, understands alliterative meter well enough to make it work today!

It's ironic that LT made two changes which significantly reduced the likelihood of finding "similar" libraries or libraries of interest: it got rid of "clickability" of the overlapping books on Members With Your Books lists, and it has hidden Profile messages from the public.

In the past most of the contacts I made and attention received (and on occasion have shown) came via these two aspects.

it got rid of "clickability" of the overlapping books on Members With Your Books lists

What do you mean?

Best explained here I think

https://www.librarything.com/topic/355370

In my case the lower amount of talk messages is directly tied to my increased reading. I’ve had a reading slump lasting years but still liked to talk about books so hung out a lot in Talk threads, but after mostly ditching social media at the beginning of this year, I’ve gotten back into reading, and thus spend less time on Talk.
I primarily hang out in the 75’ers group and the people whose threads I read and reply to and who reply to mine are mostly people whose introduction post I thought sounded interesting and then starred their thread (or they came to my thread after I’d written my introduction post and I followed them back). These include people who read wildly different genres to me and who have different interests, but we like each other anyway.
The only interest-specific groups I take part in are Needlearts (which im a fairly inactive admin for) and Geek who read the classics.

>22 LolaWalser:

I think this is a fair point, although I would note that that feature doesn't work all that well for me. The way that I put this is, the last time I checked, I went to the library that was most like mine -- and found that I was only fifteenth on that person's list of similar libraries. The library that is most like mine -- isn't actually much like mine.

OK, I'm incredibly strange. There is no one on LT whose interests closely align with mine. (I've never met such a person in real life, either.) But what that means is that the best I can hope for is a person who shares a particular "trait," so to speak, with me. So is there anyone here who, for instance, shares a strong interest in traditional folk music scholarship? This is only a segment of my library, but it's an important segment. Is there a way to find someone who shares that segment?

I don't see a way to do it based on book lists, off the top of my head, and I do work at algorithm design. Maybe someone else has an idea. But it's the failure for libraries to align in their entirety that makes me wish for some sort of "want ads."

>24 waltzmn:

I should specify I think mostly in terms of finding interesting titles and topics, not people (although that is not unwelcome, just not something one ought to take for granted).

Therefore, "similarity" to me serves as a signal that something else interesting might be present, rather than as the entire point in itself (a basis for personal communication, if I understand you). For example, I can easily identify other people with my scientific interests, but what interests me more is what ELSE they might be collecting.

Broadly, I'm more interested in what I don't know or lack, than in what is familiar - but the famlliar serves as a signal, a hook.

>25 LolaWalser: Broadly, I'm more interested in what I don't know or lack, than in what is familiar - but the famlliar serves as a signal, a hook.

I generally agree. But, for me, what LT offers isn't even a way to find the familiar.

Probably the way to make this work, for an eclectic library, would be to do something like look at each person's genres, and find rates of similarity for books in that genre. But that would probably be very system-intensive.

>26 waltzmn:

Well, the weighed algorithm isn't bad (a side problem for libraries like mine is a large proportion of books in languages other than English, indicating sourcing from different pools of titles, different contexts).

The problem is that now even that doesn't lead one far, most people probably stop at that one list.

>27 LolaWalser: Well, the weighed algorithm isn't bad

Oh, it's certainly interesting, and it may work for a lot of people. But, I emphasize, it does not work for me. That's my point about how it doesn't find people much like me. As a matter of fact, I have met the person whose library is most like mine -- and don't particularly care for him. His ex-wife is, I think, pretty interesting, but he is just too arrogant....

LOL, The discussion about Middle English Romances proves my point:
I stumbled on this thread when I was looking for a Treasure Hunt thing;
I ended up in a thread about social connections with 12 people commenters;
3 have read at least one translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and 2 have read something of Chrétien de Troyes— and have opinions (I mean what are the odds on that alone?!);
But it is pure dumb luck that these connections showed up! So yeah, there’s gotta be a better way to discover commonalities.

>23 PawsforThought: Yeah, I use the starred threads but I discovered is that I’m now in few groups with all the same people! This has resulted in reading a lot of cross-posted reviews but no real new discoveries.

>28 waltzmn: And yeah, hangouts can be fraught too. There always seems to be that one person who makes it impossible to stay and keep your sanity (and to be fair I might be “that person” to someone else). OTOH, finding a greater number of like-minded readers can greatly mitigate that.

>24 waltzmn: My maths brain is broke today but maybe a tracker of “Currently Reading” hits? Hangouts can be collected liked starred threads…

Ok, whew! That’s more engagement in a few hours than I think I’ve had all year! I’m off to re-read The Club Dumas (by Arturo Pérez-Reverte; translated from the Spanish by Sonia Soto)— and order a copy of The Gest of Robyn Hood just because now I’m curious 🙂

>29 Tanya-dogearedcopy:

The Club Dumas is a favorite of mine.

>22 LolaWalser:

Take a look at your profile now. I've added a toggle to get the numbers.

>31 timspalding:

oh, WOW! Thanks so much! That looks perfect! Yeah, I checked also looking at others' lists -- that's the link-hopping I was missing!

>28 waltzmn: For me, the Similar libraries list is great at identifying friends but not my narrow fields of interest. Of the 20 libraries that are displayed in the non-expanded list of similar libraries on my profile page, I know twelve of them from outside LibraryThing (and we all joined independently, as far as I know).

>33 anglemark:

As best I can tell, Similar Libraries haven't identified anything for me. But it does occur to me that there would possibly be a trick LT could do. As I mentioned, when I look at the list of libraries most similar to mine, I find someone who is first. But I'm not first, or even close to it, on that person's list.

It might be interesting to have a measure of mutual closeness. My ratio with this other fellow is 1:15. Not a good match. Suppose that, however, I'm the fifth-closest library to the person who is fourth on my list, so 4:5, or 1:1.25. That might be a better way of finding similar people than just the first name on the list.

Dunno. LT has not been a place to meet people, for me. I know a lot of user names, but no deep conversations. :-)

>34 waltzmn: I think all the books we have by Swedish authors creates a similarity base that people with most books in English don't have, and acts as a selection filter much more powerful than subjects.

>34 waltzmn: Out of the millions of libraries cataloged on LT, you are 15th on someone's most similar library list. That sounds pretty close to me.

>36 jjwilson61:

This misses the point I'm trying to make. That person is #1 on my list; I am #15 on his. It's not even close to reciprocal. The fact that I have met the guy is in line with our common interest, because it was at a folk music concert. But our common interest isn't much of one -- and I didn't like him anyway.

Hence my thought that it might be more useful for me to have a list of people for whom my library stands relatively close to theirs -- not my top twenty libraries, but the twenty people for whom my library stands highest on their list.

I agree the finding is probably the first item for building connection, but that second item, the hanging out is equally important even if sequentially second.

In my experience, the most successful hang-out on LT is a weekly asynchronous reading club. Notably not a Book Club, it selected short fiction (though I've always thought short non-fiction or verse could work as well) allowing groups to have a focused conversation, and also for potential participants to skip 1 week and just go on to the next. Very little sunk cost. This allowed the sorts of conversations and connections mentioned above, and definitely led into quite a few "other" conversations based primarily on mutual interests, not always linked to the short story content itself.

That reading club is still going: DEEP ONES, though my participation has slackened dramatically.

>38 elenchus: In my experience, the most successful hang-out on LT is a weekly asynchronous reading club.

I like this idea. Indeed, that suggests another feature: A place where people can propose such a reading group. ("Proposed Reading Group: Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice, or whatever.) If you get enough people together, you start the group.

This would also allow you to specify other parameters. For example, in the case of Pride and Prejudice, you might want to specify whether it's people who have read it before or first-time readers. If I'm going to read The Gest of Robyn Hode, I would probably take anyone, because I'd straighten them out eventually. :-) But were I to join a group reading The Lord of the Rings, I'd want to specify one that wants to study the roots of the story, not the adventure -- the folklore, the languages, the theology. I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with reading LotR for the plot, but it isn't fun for me. I'd want it to be my sort of group.

Or if it were an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland group, I might want it to be a group that studies intensely Lewis Carroll's wordplay (and isn't obsessed with false notions about his sex life).

So that's a very good feature: The "Let's-find-a-reading-group" forum.

I suppose this is an RSI, but if there was a standing Collection called "Match Libraries" or something similar, that you could use for matching your library with other users much as you can base recommendations on individual collections and not on your entire library. Or could at least, I'm not sure how the new recommendation system works.

>40 anglemark: Isn't the "use for connections" ticky meant for matching with others?

though I'm equally unsure about the new recommendations system, and whether it listens to the "use for recommendations" ticky.

>41 keristars: Hmjm. I've never seen Connections as something that is calculated, just as groups of libraries that you add manually yourself. I thought that tick box was used to decide which books that are included when you see activity from your connections. You mean that my list of similar libraries isn't based on the total number of books we share in all collections, just on books in collections that have been selected for this?

Interesting. I have to experiment (and see what the wiki says).

>42 anglemark: I could be entirely wrong, or it could have changed since I established my understanding. :)

>39 waltzmn:

My idea doesn't seem to have attracted any interest yet, but I'm going to extend it anyway. :-) In addition to discussion groups, I find myself interested in classes or commentaries. We have a lot of people here who have read books with great interest and insight. And, right now, the only way they can share that is via reviews (which are not suited for it) or talk posts (which are hard to find and won't tend to be noticed if they are old).

I don't know how much interest there would be in actual classes, but I would be very interested in others' commentaries on books, and I would probably contribute a few were the feature offered.

>44 waltzmn: That sounds pretty intriguing. What format are you envisioning the classes to take? Pre-recorded video lectures, that kind of thing?

>45 GandalfTheGreen: That sounds pretty intriguing. What format are you envisioning the classes to take? Pre-recorded video lectures, that kind of thing?

Realize that I just thought of this this morning, and haven't thought out all the implications. :-) It would be up to LT staff to implement anyway, and they might well object to the storage and bandwidth requirements of videos. :-) Insofar as I had thought of anything, it was more along the lines of a live PowerPoint-type presentation -- lower storage requirements.

I claim no real ownership of the idea; if others can improve on it, all the better!

Maybe it will help if I explain what set me thinking of it. I have just finished an award-winning story that I found difficult to understand and deliberately irritating insofar as I did understand it. So why did it win an award? Maybe it was just that the author was famous, but maybe I was missing some key point. So I would welcome some sort of commentary to explain it.

And then I thought of all the stuff I have in my files that doesn't have any really viable outlet. A full-blown commentary on the Gest of Robyn Hode. An article on the relationship between J.R.R. Tolkien's Smith of Wootton Major and Sir Orfeo. Another on the relationship between Tolkien and traditional folk song. Maybe one on the relationship between science fiction and Chaucer's House of Fame. The use of traditional folklore in the Harry Potter sequence, although that one has been published in a book that no one knows exists. :-) For that matter, a commentary on some of the biographies of Lewis Carroll that fail to understand him because they don't understand how his (widely acknowledged) autism affected his life and his relationships with little girls. It's a significant pile. So maybe I could give as well as receive.

So I would like to see classes, or commentary, or something, and it strikes me that LT would be a logical place to make such resources available.

>12 timspalding: timspalding: It's unclear to me how to think of this. LibraryThing has always been for different types of users. If a user wants to catalog and not socialize, okay. We love you either way. At the same time, I can't help feeling that we are missing out. I want at least some of those people taking an active role in our social life.

Adding my twopenneth as an rare user of groups. Firstly the lack of a dark theme means reading in groups hurts my eyes. I use the Dark Reader extension in Firefox which due to something odd happening means I only see boxes and the occassional word. (I've had to switch it off to read this thread).

As others have said finding groups which might be on interest is a challenge. Any groups I'm in I've found by searching for a specific topic.

Keeping up with conversations is challenging. I'm not on Library Thing every day as I primarily use it for cataloguing. The groups seems to work best if you are active in the conversations. It's not easy just to pop in and out, or indeed start contributing if joining a group of long standing and active members.

And now back to the shadows ...

>47 Cotswoldreader:

Thank you for your input. I think your request for a dark mode is something I'll put on the survey (https://www.librarything.com/topic/373579). The new app will have it. I have not put much thought into doing it on the website.

We should not mistake "social" for the main dimension along which LibraryThing will act and change in the future. Our greatest feature is the cataloging, and we need to defend and expand that.

That said, a few thoughts on social issues.

First, LibraryThing doesn't have the scale to make your "natural" friend graph work. Your real-world friends probably aren't on LibraryThing, so features to show you more about what they're doing will fall flat. Also real-world/offline-world social networking has faded somewhat. People just aren't as interested in finding out what second- and third-tier friends had for breakfast or what they added to their wish list. We COULD beef our up find-friends feature, especially on the app. I'm not convinced this will move the dial much.

The holy grail of bookish social is getting people to talk about books. As I see it, the chief problem is coordination, the second conversation-initiation.

Coordination is a matter of timing and information. There are a lot of books out there. Few members are reading the same book, unless it's a super-duper-bestseller having its moment in the sun, and even then it's a tiny fraction of the member base. Also, members need to FIND that members are talking about the book.

LibraryThing's "About" feature was an effort to solve the latter problem. If you go to talk under "Book Discussions," you'll see a "Your Books" tab that tells you all the conversations going on about your books. For example, within the last month, people have been talking about Murderbot books, Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels, The Iliad and The Bible, all of which I have. Unfortunately, people don't click on it much.

I've thought about putting about into notifications, so members can get notified when one of their books starts being discussed. Obviously this would need to be opt-in, although I could push a notification to check out the new things we can notify you about.

For a while now my idea to solve the coordination problem has been to have an essentially automatic calendar of "Days to Discuss." So, for example, September 15th would be the day to chat about The Hobbit and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Snow Crash, September 16th would be Bowling Alone, Wuthering Heights, and Strunk and White, etc. By default you'd see only your days, but could see all the days too. Days could be themed--"Fantasy Friday," etc. A thread would either come into existence on that day, or would exist for a few days before, but messages would be posted, but hidden, until the Day to Discuss arrives. Staff or members would post some triggering questions, helping get over the conversation-initiation hump. It would be closed soon after. So, in theory, coordination and scarcity, driving focus.

Would it work? I figure a 5% chance.

>49 timspalding: The holy grail of bookish social is getting people to talk about books.

Agree.

I also think that providing some structure could be very helpful, and the tricky bit will be finding how much is useful while remaining flexible for all sorts of uses.

Should you attempt your idea or one like it, I suggest also having a section within each work page to gather those various threads and groups. As noted by several posters, I often read a book when others are not, but would benefit from their (historical) discussions, and could add to dormant threads with my new post. The asynchronous aspect of online discussions has great potential, in the same way that reviews are so useful years after LTers originally post them.

I love the recently introduced ability to drop a review into a Talk thread, and I feel like it has untapped potential. As >50 elenchus: suggests, maybe there could be another order of link besides "Mentions" (touchstones) and "Abouts" (thread attributions), for "Review discussion," to lead from the work page to the relevant talk threads.

>49 timspalding:
"Coordination is a matter of timing and information. There are a lot of books out there. Few members are reading the same book, unless it's a super-duper-bestseller having its moment in the sun, and even then it's a tiny fraction of the member base. Also, members need to FIND that members are talking about the book."

I concluded long ago that there simply are not enough people on LT to attract conversations about the books I read. When there are fewer than 200 cataloged copies on the site, the chances that someone is actively reading the book and interested in a conversation now are vanishingly small.

When I have looked at the mentions feature, it's filled with lists and other non-substantive posts. Every once in a while there is a sentence or short paragraph, usually as part of a personal reading thread that is several years old. Nothing that invites conversation.

>52 eromsted: I concluded long ago that there simply are not enough people on LT to attract conversations about the books I read. When there are fewer than 200 cataloged copies on the site, the chances that someone is actively reading the book and interested in a conversation now are vanishingly small.

This is absolutely and obviously true. But is your reading order entirely fixed? Mine isn't. Were there a book that I am interested in, but not planning to meet immediately, and I learned that a group was going to read it together, I would change my schedule. So I think @timspalding's comment "Also, members need to FIND that members are talking about the book" is the key issue here.

>53 waltzmn: That people would select a book I'd be interested in reading is also very unlikely. Years ago I read Dawkins' The God Delusion for an LT discussion. That was not entirely without value. But it mainly confirmed my prior vague belief that he had nothing interesting to say about religion.

I've had similar problems with in-person book groups. They just never picked anything I really wanted to read.

>54 eromsted: Years ago I read Dawkins' The God Delusion for an LT discussion.... But it mainly confirmed my prior vague belief that he had nothing interesting to say about religion.

Of course he doesn't have anything to say about it -- because he confuses his religion (militant atheism) with actual atheism, which is a different thing (and is genuinely not a religion, unlike what Dawkins believes).

I've had similar problems with in-person book groups. They just never picked anything I really wanted to read.

This has been my problem too; the difference is, I think in a community of two million people, there are probably some people who would want to read some books that interest me. Not all books that interest me, or I wouldn't have so many single-copy works, but some books. The trick is to find them.

>54 eromsted:

Dawkins has plenty of interesting things to say about the effects of religion on society. Your own criticism is too vague to address.

>55 waltzmn:

he confuses his religion (militant atheism) with actual atheism, which is a different thing (and is genuinely not a religion, unlike what Dawkins believes).

Oh, please.

>56 LolaWalser: Oh, my. I was merely illustrating a personal experience. I was not intending to discuss the book in this thread. Feel free to look up the old thread with my longer thoughts.

>57 eromsted:

Feel free to provide a link, and I might.

>56 LolaWalser: Oh, please.

Just to be clear: I consider myself an atheist, but I really don't like the militant atheists like Dawkins. They are sure they know the truth. I am someone who hopes I know the truth, but am willing to consider more data -- and hope I would be humble enough to listen to it. I am not an agnostic, but I am willing to listen. That is fundamentally different from Dawkins and the like.

Dawkins is a very good scientist, but as a theologian, he's highly irritating.

I'm not sure his theology would help, but evolution is one potential lens to understand social-networking dynamics. ;)

>60 timspalding:

Glad to find something we can agree on. :-)

>51 paradoxosalpha: maybe there could be another order of link besides "Mentions" (touchstones) and "Abouts" (thread attributions), for "Review discussion"

Reflecting on this, it occurred to me something I would like to see would be a forum for discussing a specific work, and the ability to pull in existing LT content to help shape the discussion I was interested in having with others. The forum could be launched from the Work page, and there could be more than one.

So a variant of a Talk thread, but with links to existing reviews (more than one, possibly, and certainly not only my own), other threads, published reviews. Visually appealing in the way the current "My review" is when dropped into a post. There could be outside links too, though of course that gets messy if those links change. And some way to frame all of this up, such as: "I'm curious about the theme of Christian evangelism in Spufford's alternate history story, Cahokia Jazz. Is the character Burrow especially important to this theme? How significant is the fact he was an orphan?" -- but pointing out which parts of the reviews I link are of interest, or why a specific thread is linked (since it's likely to include a lot of other discussion not as relevant).

The specifics are not important here, I'm trying to convey that the current Talk allows for the above, but it would be clunky, would probably result in a wall of text, and any ensuing discussion could easily lose focus as the OP scrolled off the page. So a forum that could address some of those shortcomings is what I'm after.

I never want to join a book club of any sort, but the rest of y'all have fun! I'm happy with how LT is now, and there's room for lots of different use cases.

>13 waltzmn: I'm also interested in some of these things, particularly the folk music scholarship, but I have learned more about it on websites than in books... Any recommendations?

>64 kicking_k: I'm also interested in some of these things, particularly the folk music scholarship, but I have learned more about it on websites than in books... Any recommendations?

Keeping in mind that I said traditional folk music scholarship. So if your only interest is in, say, Peter Paul and Mary or Bob Dylan, I have no insight to offer and you might as well stop reading. :-)

That said, the best place for discussion is probably the Mudcat Café,

https://mudcat.org/

(although they're having certificate problems again). If you want to get more technical, the Ballad-L mailing list fits that bill, though it's getting pretty quiet as the community dies off.

Two good reference sites are "Folk Song and Music Hall" and "Mainly Norfolk":

https://folksongandmusichall.com/

https://mainlynorfolk.info/folk/

The ultimate folk music bibliography site is Steve Roud's Folk Song and Broadside index site at the Vaughan Williams library site:

https://archives.vwml.org/search/roud

And, of course, there is my modest offering, the Traditional Ballad Index, generally believed to be the largest collection of folk music research on the Internet (Steve Roud's is the best bibliography, by an order of magnitude, but it's only bibliographic; mine is the site for background information, and is now past the 30,000 song mark).

https://balladindex.org/

Go to the Quick or Full Table of Contents and search for a song of interest. Some won't have anything, but the longest entries can be many pages. You can tell how long from the contents. For example, the seventh item down is

1913 Massacre: (4 refs.

>37 waltzmn: "This misses the point I'm trying to make. That person is #1 on my list; I am #15 on his. It's not even close to reciprocal."

But it is relevant. Given the number of libraries on LT the difference between #1 and #15 is a rounding error. You're obsessing over nothing.

>66 jjwilson61: But it is relevant. Given the number of libraries on LT the difference between #1 and #15 is a rounding error. You're obsessing over nothing.

Consider what you are saying: can you really drive 845 miles an hour and never crash into anything? Because 845:55 as 15:1. Hardly insignificant. Ratios matter.

You would probably be right in general, if there were any libraries like my library on LT. But there really aren't. Interestingly, the library I was talking about is no longer my closest. I seem to recall that LT used to give an actual weight of relationship, and it no longer does. But I can at least say that the library that is now closest to mine by weighted average shares just 94 books with me. Out of more than 600 in that other library, and more than 6000 in mind. It comes out on top because the books involved have relatively high weights. (Though I get to add the footnote that there is something strange going on there, because it's a legacy library, and it appears roughly a third of the common books were published after the person died!) But it's still a low rate of agreement, and it all involves just one of the major categories in my library.

A way to demonstrate that that library is not much like mine is that fact that there are many libraries closer to it. That is my point, and the simple fact remains that there is no library on LT that bears much resemblance to mine.

I really do wish we had those weight statistics, because I'd be fascinated to see the sorts of numbers other people get. But if they still exist, I don't know how to access them.

>65 waltzmn: Thank you, that's very helpful. I will go and browse forthwith.

No, I didn't mean modern folk; my area of interest is more old ballads in the broadsheet and oral-tradition periods. I'm a relative tyro, but I come from a background in Scottish and English literature, Renaissance drama specifically. I got into it through some songs friends shared with me, and through a discussion of murder ballads that I stumbled across. But I'm keen to find out more.

>68 kicking_k: If you're interested in broadsides specifically, the great thing about the last few decades is how many have been digitized. The Bodleian Library had the best collection of all, and it is down indefinitely because their software ceased to be supported. :-( But the National Library of Scotland also has a good collection:

http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/index.html

Smaller but still significant is the James Murray collection:

https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/archivespecialcollections/discover/specialcollec...

The Library of Congress's sheet music collection is also useful.

I won't take up everyone else's time with more suggestions. If you want to contact me directly, feel free.

Ah thank you! We're circling round to areas I do know about - I live in Edinburgh so the National Library of Scotland is my local copyright library :)

Shame about the Bodleian's collection. You'd think Oxford had deep enough pockets to fix that... I'm an alumna; perhaps I should complain!

I'll message you.

>67 waltzmn: "Because 845:55 as 15:1. Hardly insignificant. Ratios matter."

But it has to be a relevant ratio and what's relevant is the actual similarity of the libraries to yours. If the first library had a similarity score of 99 and the 2nd had a score of 99.9998 down the the 15th which had a score of 99.9985 then the relevant ratio here is 99 to 99.9985.

You may be right and the similarity drops off quickly but my point is that the rank order of the libraries isn't very meaningful by itself.

Sorry to belabor the point and you can just drop this if you want.

>71 jjwilson61: You may be right and the similarity drops off quickly but my point is that the rank order of the libraries isn't very meaningful by itself.

The way that I would put it is that the rank order isn't inherently meaningful -- nit quite the same thing. There needs to be a measure of deviation. If a person has a lot of similar libraries, yes, the fifteenth closest will still be pretty close. If the person has very few, then the fifteenth closest is likely to be very remote. (Not certain, because there might be library clusters, but likely.)

So we really have two parameters, which we might call base similarity and deviation. Were this a standard distribution, that would be enough to define the distribution, as μ and σ define a normal distribution. Of course not all libraries will follow the same distribution, and we don't have μ and σ, or base similarity and deviation, for anybody's libraries. But if it is known that a library has a low base similarity, the deviation is likely to be high.

Can we agree that much depends on the nature of the library involved? Because I concede your point with regard to a library with high base similarity. I don't concede it on my library. :-)

>72 waltzmn: I feel understood now.

>48 timspalding: I have not put much thought into doing it on the website.

This is very disappointing to hear, if I'm being honest. Since I sustained eye damage, Talk has been more difficult for me and frequently gives me eye strain & fatigue because of the white space. I don't and do not plan to use the app. Dark mode is an accessibility feature, and it's disappointing to hear that even after a well-supported RSI thread, it still hasn't had any thought put into it — only on the app, which many don't use, because even on mobile devices the website has more robust features.

As for increasing sociability, I have a few ideas, and I'd love to hear what others think about them.

One thing is about changing Touchstones. I'll disclose: I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement. Basically, what I envision is that when you add a touchstone, immediately next to or below the book(/author/series) that pops up to the right of the textbox is a slider. By default, this slider is on an option for 'mentions' — I included this book in a list, or as an example to illustrate a point. I only mentioned it. With a click (or a tap, on mobile), the slider changes to an option for 'discussion' — I wrote/inserted a review for this book, I'm exploring the themes within, etc. — I'm inviting discussion about this book. When going into a books 'community' or 'social' page, touchstones are divided into 'discussions' first, and then a separate section for 'mentions' (I also strongly believe authors and series should have touchstones listed, and I still don't understand why they do not).
Now, before anyone says something about it, I do know of the 'About' feature, which separates the thread in the 'community' page from touchstones, but I was just talking about this feature with an LT newbie the other day, and A) in my experience, people don't use it much, and B) most of the time, when I am inviting discussion about a book, I'm doing it as part of a larger conversation than just about the single book. Yes, I do invite people to share their thoughts of Soul of an Octopus, and I'd love to talk about the book, but my entire thread isn't about only that book, it's about all the books I've read this year, or it's about books about rivers and oceans. I'd love to participate in more of those discussions about books I really like, but it's hard to find them when said book will have 0 or 1 'about' thread, and I have to seek out which 'touchstone' threads seem to be inviting discussion about the books when the vast majority of threads on any 'touchstone' list seem to be things like TBRs, recommendation lists, lists of books read without reviews or commentary, or otherwise not inviting discussion.

In that vein, there's something about books that I think would do with a change. I'm not sure what I would call this feature, but my thoughts behind it are like this: I would love to get notifications for discussions about an obscure favourite book of mine, to see a new cover of a book that had 0 covers when I catalogued it, to read a review of a book on my TBR. I do NOT want to get notifications every time someone mentions Harry Potter, I do NOT want to see every new cover uploaded for the Quran, and I do NOT need to read every review of 1984 by every bored teenager who didn't like being forced to read it. I do not use the 'recent covers for your books' or 'recent reviews for your books' (even though I would otherwise really, really enjoy these features) because they are completely overrun by the most popular books on this site, and I don't really care about new covers OR new reviews about those. Likewise, I would be really, really interested in getting notified for new conversations about some of my books, but if the default setting were for all of my books, that feature too would immediately be rendered useless by Harry Potter and LoTR conversations. I don't know where this setting would live, but if I am to make use of any of these (or new upcoming) features, I need a way to either opt out certain books that cause over-representation problems, or to opt in only the books I could see myself using these features for. Personally, I would prefer an opt-out, but I would make do with either. Maybe it could be called 'muting' a book?

As for book conversations, I think a 'find/start a book club' feature would be really helpful. I could see it working as a new Group in the Talk feature, but I also think it could stand on its own as a brand new feature. Maybe you could somehow attach tags, lists, series, authors, GenreThing genres, etc. to your request, and in certain places on the website, when someone has a large amount of books with that tag, or someone visits that author page, that person can see some message about 'someone is seeking a bookclub about this' or 'ongoing book club here!' with a link.

Finally, as for finding people with similar interests — I notice a wish that has been expressed in this thread is to find someone with just one interest in common, yet the 'similar libraries' feature being discussed analyses one's entire library (ie, all your interests) and compares it to every one else's entire library, no? I wonder if it might help people find like minds if there was a 'similar collections' feature, or 'similar tags', where one could find that their collection of murder mysteries or literary criticism was very similar to another's collection of the same, even if the two users' libraries were otherwise totally different. Now, this wouldn't quite work for everyone — for example, I currently use 'collections' as a very overarching phenomenon, and not for subjects — my collections include the juvenile collection, storage, and the special collection, and I don't see myself expanding to what others might be using collections for — in which case I might have had education, arts, natural science, SFF, feminism, disability, etc. as collections. I use collections the way an institutional library might use the word collections, and to reduce confusion, I don't plan on also adding any other uses for this feature. I might eventually use tags for this purpose, or if LT added a 'shelves'/'bookshelves' feature such as I understand GoodReads to have, I would use that. Nonetheless, for the purposes of finding people with similar interests, especially very niche ones, I think something like comparing the books only within one collection, tag, bookshelf, etc. will facilitate that far better than comparing libraries fully (although I wouldn't want 'similar libraries' to go away, either)

Thanks for reading my rambling on and on. Let me know your thoughts.

For what it's worth, the existing About is okay to use >75 GraceCollection: (per the feature 'rules') even if a thread covers multiple subjects – so long as the 'about' is significant/substantial. But if a problem is not many people do use the feature, or that there's no motivation to 'about' older/existing touchstone mentions that deserve it, then some updates to the feature, like you suggest, may be useful to increasing the likelihood of it being set. Eg. your slider idea, could auto-mark it with an 'about'. Having some ways, on the Community page of a work (series pages could benefit from one of these too), that any of us can set what 'type' of touchstone it is, so users starting at that page benefit from past users' sorting efforts. Having other types we could set?; news, group read, review discussion, mention, etc. (>50 elenchus: covered similar ground, and 'group read' if it triggered a notification, or fed into a home page module could help gather readers like >39 waltzmn: spoke on).

I think one thing is to finish off stuff that was mentioned earlier. For example adding Author Awards (as in awards to a person - author / cover artist) in addition to Book Awards. I think this was talked about when Awards were revamped.

>48 timspalding: Ugh. Really? We've been begging for a dark mode for years. I don't particularly have the eye issues described by others, but oy vey in the morning this website is painful to the point of avoidance.

>74 GraceCollection: and >78 Bookmarque: If it helps, I know this is very high on @conceptDawg's preferences to put out. I have confidence we'll have a dark mode sooner than later.

>74 GraceCollection: >78 Bookmarque: Not to worry, conceptDawg is our champion for dark mode among power that be. (It cannot come soon enough. Seriously, LT is the ONLY site I spend considerable time on that has the white blaring at me all the time)

>77 andyl: And awards to series, and to specific translators, and illustrators, and cover designers...