I killed the tags tab, and I am not sorry!

I killed the tags tab. It deserved it. You can lock me up, copper, but I am not sorry.

I have killed the tags tab, and changed "Your library" to "Your books."

Here's why I killed the tags tab.

1. In the catalog, "tags" has become "organize." This is because it will soon also have collections on it—allowing you to turn tags into collections, for example. This had to happen. It has happened now.
2. It is not a link to a separate page, but to a mode of the "Your books" page.
3. The main argument for a tags tab was speed—a quick way to get to a list of your tags. I regret that it's now two clicks, but at least the catalog is slightly faster.
4. Interface elements are silent killers. As it is, we have 10 top-level tags. That's a large number. Every option you add, past maybe four, gives you a little more functionality, but adds a little confusion and a little to the impression that LT is over-complex.

Ideally, I'd like to change to menus with optional drop-downs. We have a good prototype there, but it doesn't work with the current catalog page. We are committed to doing it, but it won't happen before collections.

I know some percent of members are going to be upset here. There were last time I did this. Don't take this the wrong way, but there's a lot of truth to Jason Friend's assessment that, users are like babies: You can give them candy and they'll be happy, but never ever take candy away from them. Sometimes, however, it's not candy, it's a stone or grandma's heart pills.

"Your library" has changed to "Your books" for the following reason:

1. To make way for collections. The default category in collections is called "Your library." The intent is to provide a catch-all for people's personal collections, as contrasted with "wish lists," "read but unowned," etc. Of course, you can use it however you want.
2. "Your library" feels a little more "possessive" than "your books."
3. "Your library" sounds great to me, but it leaves some with the impression that LibraryThing is somehow a "library" site—by which is meant that it's about the big building downtown with the librarians and etc. Of course, we love libraries, and many features are geared to libraries, but we are a book site first and foremost. We are stuck with "Library"Thing. Indeed, I love the name and its contrast with less serious competitors. But we don't need to rub it in. I note, for example, that it has always been "Add books" not "Add to your library."

That it. I really don't want to budge on the core issue here—the tags tab. So I suggest members who feel something has been taken away from them tell me how I can make good without adding the tab back.

Put a tab link to it on my home page, and I promise to (attempt to) cope.

Home page or profile page? Where do you want it?

Home page, thank you.

It's nifty on the My Books page, but I'm always going to it for something or other and the home page loads faster than my library/catalog/books whatever it is now.

BTW, will we ever get Author search back on the author pages? (might as well ask, as long as I'm on a roll, here.)

I see a link to 'Distinct Tags' under 'Your Zeitgeist'. I toyed with my home page so much a while back that I don't know the default, YMMV.
I like this change, your books is better.

I don't really like the "Your books" change, because you allow dvds and other things like that (I know the site doesn't support them, but you allow them), so calling it "your books" is likely to be simply *wrong* for many people. And it implies that that's all that's supposed to go in there.

(yes, I'm a book-only cataloguer, but that doesn't mean anything) I think the fact that LT also has movies/music catalogued should at least be acknowledged. Libraries have newspapers, music, movies, etc etc. Calling it "Your books", that sounds like less of an ownership thing then "your library", less of a connection.

The tags tab? I fought long and hard last time you took it away, and I'm sure you remember that. Not this time. lol I could care less.

>4 PhaedraB:

No, where on the home page. Suggest a place it would fit. A new "quick links" sections? Give me some help on where you'd want it—without it being a big yellow box labelled "Just for PhaedraB."

BTW, will we ever get Author search back on the author pages?

One request per customer.

. 3

Profile page, please.

I hardly ever use the home page.

Ugh. I really couldn't care less that "Your library" is now "Your books" but I really miss the Tags tab already. Losing that tab is going to shift how I use LT and that will take some getting used to. I accept that the tab isn't coming back -- I don't like it, but you sound firm on this one -- but please give us some way to get to the tag list from the home page rather than being buried one further click away under the innocuous name of Organize.

Edited for stupidity - I need to go to bed!

>8 lilithcat:

It's on the profile page already. See all tags.

> But my home page takes a long time to load as well

Okay, but the home page loads by ajax. You don't need it all to load. Right?

Edited for stupidity - nevermind!

6>

(probably opening a can of worms, and maybe this isn't the best place for those worms, but....)

I'm pretty sure LT is intended to be a book(only)-cataloging site. Yes, people catalog other things, and yes, Tim and Co. don't run around deleting that other stuff (I can't imagine the work that would be required to do that, really). But in the end, it's is a book-cataloging site, so calling it "Your Books" is totally acceptable, and logical even.

Let's not get into the books/not-books issue, frankly. Can of worms.

>10 PortiaLong:/12

I deleted the content of my earlier posts because I was mistaken about current functionality.

Could we maybe chage the "see all tags" to "see tag list" - so that it is more obvious that it won't just expand the list in situ? (the way that "show all" does in some other areas)

It might take me a while to get out of the old habit (tab) and into the new (organize) but it'll happen. It's all looking so clean and streamlined! Kudos for all your hard work.

If your home page includes Your Zeitgeist or Your Top Tags you can get to the Tags page from Home already. But I guess that ties into the issue of customization mentioned on another thread (e.g., people missing out on things based on their set-up).

ETA 'your top tags' -- was caught out by my own customization. Point well made...

*sigh* Okay, I'll back off the books vs other stuff, but.... It doesn't doesn't feel right. I mean, "your books" could refer to books you've bought, books you've written, books you are carrying in your backpack. I don't know, I don't know how to explain why I don't like it so much. I can explain why I *do* like Your Library, though: the sense of connection. Isn't that what you've always talked about, Tim? The connection. With "Your Library", it wasn't just a list of books that I've read or whatever, it was *MY* *Library*. It was a comfy, personal place, with books that I feel connected to and can do so many things with. It felt like a library feels, all cozy and book-smelly and stuff. I mean, that's how I imagined it. "Your books" just doesn't have that feel. It's just so impersonal.

I like Your Books. It reinforces the fact that the fields are only set up for books and using them for something else will require some compromises.

I'm ok with "Your Books". I have the same warm fuzzy feelings about "Your Library" that Heather19 has, but if its the default category in Collections, then thats ok... as long as its somewhere :)

17>

I do agree that "Your Library" has a warmer feel to it.

(Makes my subdued inner librarian feel like the grand librarian of my own dominion, I guess :)

I mean, "your books" could refer to books you've bought, books you've written, books you are carrying in your backpack.

Well, that's the point. Your library implies they are sitting on your shelves.

Okay, so I shouldn't have said that part. I just meant that "your books" could refer to anything, and therefore doesn't have as nice of a feel as Your Library does.

But yeah yeah, I'll get used to it.

*goes to sulk in a corner before the anger comes* (bad day, sorry)

I quite like the change to "your books". It feels more appropriate when you consider that the next tab is "add books". Makes the tabs more harmonious. And I think it should make it more obvious to a first timer what is going on. But I didn't have a strong emotional response to "your library" before, so I don't mind it moving somewhere else and getting a new job description.

So now I have to load the whole library to get to the tags to get to the part of the library I want to see. I try to avoid opening the whole library.

Do you know how long it takes to load the whole library?

I do think it feels a little colder.

>25 MarthaJeanne:

Are you on broadband?

Incidentally, you shouldn't have to wait for the whole library—or whole page to be precise. What browser are you? Most will load it in pieces.

I get 10 seconds on first load. 2 seconds on subsequent loads.

I like the change, since I plan to use My Library for books that I own, and other collections for other things. It makes sense to me.

What can you do for reparation for taking the tags tab away? Hmmm ... oh I know! Launch collections! ;)

Well, I don't mean to complain about work you have already done, but I have to admit I find the change to "your books" confusing.

I'm so very much looking forward to collections, and I love that there is a default to "your library" meaning books I own. And a second pre-made collections category called "wish list". This is exactly why I am excited about the collections feature, I want to have a wish list.

The problem is the terminology. As far as I understand it in the abstract, a library is made up of various collections. In other words collections are a subset of a library.

But under your classification system, a library (the "your library" collection), is a subset of the "collections" larger set. All of the collections together make up "your books".

And it will be even more confusing when I have a wish list, because part of "My books" will not really be my books, because I don't own them yet, because they are on my wish list.

The best thing I can think of to solve this confusion would be to change the "Your books" label to "Your collections" , plural, meaning all of your collections. This might also satisfy the people who are using LibraryThing for music, etc.

Then once someone looks at the selections under "Your collections", they will see either the users own created categories, or your default categories such as "Your library" , "Your wish list" etc.

Hopefully my explanation of my confusion was not too confusing. Thanks for all the great work!

As far as Tags tab goes - "Yay! Big Yay! Enormous Yay!" - glad to see tab congestion going down (and I'm someone who uses the Tag page as a first-stop navigator for my library so I'm not speaking from the perspective of someone that never goes there ... still 'Yay Tim!').

Like 'Your Books', prefer it now that the option is imminent to sub-divide by collection, it makes more sense.

Though I used that tab frequently I'll get used to it. No big deal.

Prefer "Your Library" - because to me that is what LibraryThing is essentially all about: MY LIBRARY - but I'll live.

Thank you Tim.

Anybody who wants a one-click from anywhere tags button or tab can use browser features to create a bookmark, or favorite, or browser button bar button that links directly to his or her list of tags (http://www.librarything.com/tags/YourUserName)

33: Yeah. Who can live with just one LibraryThing? If I'm doing anything productive, I'll have LT open in multiple tabs: home, tags, add books, etc.

#34: Let's not forget the multiple second account open in tab using Windows Explorer rendering engine to enable more than one log in on Firefox. Who indeed can live with only one?

I was one of the people who really, really wanted to keep the tags tab but lately I've been using it a lot less as I got more comfortable accessing it in other ways. You can get there from a couple of spots on the Home page but it's not very obvious how until one starts clinking on various things. I would be in favor of a 'Your Quick Links' module on the Home page as a more obvious place to have that and other favorite page links.

Tim,

Organize doesn't work at all for me. Busy cursor for quite a long time (> 60 seconds) and then nothing, no tags displayed at all.
FF 3.08 / WinXP.

> 25 MarthaJeanne said, "So now I have to load the whole library to get to the tags to get to the part of the library I want to see. I try to avoid opening the whole library."

But you don't have to load the whole library. You can go to your profile page or your home page, both of those have links to your tags page.

Or you can bookmark your tags page as carport noted in # 33 --- good tip, carport, thanks!

Or, if you're using FireFox (and I know not everybody is, and it may be guilty of messing up the PowerBar), try the SpeedDial plug-in. I've got one SpeedDial tab just for LT with nine (3 x 3) dials to different LT pages.

39: Ooh, neat. Just downloaded. Playing...

Now that I have had some sleep and can hopefully post more coherently:

Because the Tag tab was so convenient I had actually forgotten (if I ever knew - if these are not new changes) the other ways of getting to the tag page. Reviewing this thread - there are currently a number of ways to do this without having to load your library or resort to "outside" book-marking/programs but they are not (to me) immediately obvious (and so I had forgotten about them?).

On your Profile:

You can get to the tag list page by clicking "see all tags" at the end of the short tag list in the top part of your profle. This is not intuitive to me - I would assume that clicking that would give me the list right there in the profile (the way that "Show all groups" does when someone belongs to many groups). Since I don't want to see an non-structured list of my tags sorted in use-order filling up my profile (which is what it does NOT do) I wouldn't think to click here to go to my tag list page.

This could be made more obvious by:
changing the name of the the "see all tags" link to "see tag list".

On your Home page:

You can get to your tag list by clicking "Tags" in the Zeitgeist Module. For some reason this was not as obvious to me as it should have been - it obviously goes somewhere right? Although I suppose it could also have gone to the Tag Cloud.

You can also get to your tag list by clicking the heading of the "Your Top Tags" module - but since not all module titles are clickable I don't know that I would think to do that right off the bat (is it new?). I think it would be more obvious to put a link at the end of the list offset in the corner. (Could also expand to be "Tag List | Tag Cloud")

I'm not sure if it is related or not, but I do not see a tag page now, regardless of how many times I try to go to it or relog, or clear cache. Reloading just brings back my catalog page.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3317/3450281780_3046286220_o.jpg

Again, not sure if related or not. If not, I'd probably should move my message to bugs instead of here.

>42 MikeBriggs:

Did you click on Organize?

Yes, I'm on the tag page. I know the picture, oddly, says "catalog" or something like that on the address bar, but I am on the tags page (organize). And it is blank. Need new picture I see.

Ok, took a new picture of the blank tags page that has the correct address in the address bar.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3335/3449522835_1833d24e7e_o.jpg

Mike, try the hint at this thread

>29 saraswati27:: I have to agree. Though I only catalog books on LT, I believe that all of my media is "My Library" and it is made of of collections of "My Books", "My DVDs", "My Magazines", "My Wishlist", etc.

45> I reindexed. Still blank tag page.

>47 MikeBriggs:
Well, I'm outta soap! We'll have to wait until the big boys come back on line.

Not to keen on "Your library" being changed to "Your books", but not for any reason that I've seen mentioned above.

The problem I have is that it's right next to "Add books", which makes it hard to tell the two tabs apart. So I think for ease-of-use the tab labels should be more distinct from each other.

#49, so it's not just me then? I thought I was having a particularly dense day!

Drop-down navigation would be great, especially if it could provide short-cuts, accessible from EVERY page, to "organize," recommendations, etc. I hope that goes forward.

I also agree with #29 and about changing the tab to "Your Collections." Especially these lines:

And it will be even more confusing when I have a wish list, because part of "My books" will not really be my books, because I don't own them yet, because they are on my wish list.

The best thing I can think of to solve this confusion would be to change the "Your books" label to "Your collections" , plural, meaning all of your collections. This might also satisfy the people who are using LibraryThing for music, etc.

Great idea!

Either way, Tim: I love the look of the new catalog and thank you ALL to all of the hard work you've put into it! I'm very excited about the Collections feature and appreciate all of your requests and respect for everyone's feedback. It's going to be impossible to please everyone but thanks for trying!

I never view my library as a whole. I access it through the tags page and always appreciated being able to jump to it from wherever I was in LibraryThing. With the removal of this feature, I have no particular suggestion since you have stated you don't want to return a tags tab.

I suspect I'll come up with a solution not dependant on the bestowing or denying of features by LibraryThing. I'm currently thinking of a page on my desktop, or perhaps in my favorites that links to my tags page so that I can still use it, although less easily. And I won't even get started on the fact that I tense up when I have to deal with a tag page with text that jumps around when I try to click a specific entry. Grrr!

I'd happily give up Your Library, or Your Books, (whatever) for a tags tab. Yeah, yeah, I know...but just saying.

edit - also - did the sizing of tags disappear? I used to view with 9 columns and small font in order to view my tags without having to scroll all over the place. Maybe I missed seeing it?

edut 2 - wow - LT seems to have become much much slower. I wouldn't think my large library would make tag and profile page load slowly.

49, 50:

Me as well.

18: How about 'Your Catalog?'

I think it would be excellent. With the second capital, even. It's book-title-y and instantly tells my brain "this is the most important part".

I don't miss the Tags tab at all -- as others have mentioned there are plenty of other ways to call up tags without having loaded your catalog (links on profile and home pages).

In the past, I would every once in a while click on the Tags tab when I meant to click on the Talk tab -- since I have a lot of tags, this was not good.

As for "Your books" -- I too worry about the confusion with "Add books" (not when you're thinking about, but rather when you're quickly clicking on a tab without thinking about it).

I like Your Collections, Your Catalog, Your Library (Tim's rationale notwithstanding)

I could live with anything, however.

>49 HoldenCarver:/50/54, et. al.

I vote for "Your Catalog." It's pretty obvious what it is, it doesn't conflict with the probable use of Your Library and Your Collections when collections are introduced, it helps to differentiate between the navigation tabs.

I've actually used "Catalog" as a descriptor on LT through the years because it seems clearer to me what it is.

"Your library" has changed to "Your books"...

Does that mean people can stop making idiotic arguments that anything and everything including perfumes and clothing are okay to add because some library somewhere has cataloged a stuffed bobcat?

So I suggest members who feel something has been taken away from them tell me how I can make good without adding the tab back.

Make the catalog easily sortable by "number of users" again? ;)

Can you explain what you mean by "2. It (the tabs page) is not a link to a separate page, but to a mode of the "Your books" page."? I don't understand that at all. The "My books" page -- my catalog -- is a list of all my books. The tabs page is not. (By the way, I did notice when you sneakily shoved "Tabs" back up against "List" and "Covers" as though it were the same sort of thing, after relenting the first time you tried that when you first killed the tags tab. It makes even less sense to have it there now that it's "Organize", I think.)

I completely spaced on the fact that, when it was first introduced, I customized my home page with the intention of revisiting the modules after a bit. I forgot there even WAS a "top tags" or "your zeitgeist" module; thanks for the tip on shortcutting :)

Until Collections finally come out, I think it should be called "tags" instead of "organize". (Especially since Collections have been coming "soon" since I've been here -- which is nearly two years.) "Organize" really doesn't make much sense to me without Collections, short of taking all my books out of the bookcases and playing musical shelves with them.

A new "quick links" sections? Give me some help on where you'd want it...

Ok, I can live with the Zeitgeit click on the Home page (with a big Duh! for not realizing it was there).

...without it being a big yellow box labelled "Just for PhaedraB."

I dunno, it has a nice ring to it.

OK, so if tags tab is killed for good, how about an "Organize" tab (with the default to tags page if a person chooses).

Also, please can we have a way to size the tags page text smaller again?

I like "Your Catalog". More than "Your Books". I've even used that phrase, well, my catalog, when mentioning bugs. Sounds better than saying "My books" page . . ..

Yes, let us change the tag page text size. I had mine as small as I could read it!

Thanks for all your hard work. I like change. It makes my brain work; brain work is good for me. Retired people sometimes can be very bored.

But then, again, I could go read.

Good riddance to the tags tab as far as I'm concerned (and I'm a prolific tagger). I also like the "my books" designation as opposed to "my library"; it seemed like "my library" had implications about the proper usage of LT which everyone interpreted differently, while "my books" is very neutral.

>66 jlelliott:

I would've said the opposite, that "My library" is more neutral than "My books"; in that the latter excludes people who add cds/dvds/etc as well as (or instead of) books.

-67 Let's just say I have very little pity for people who feel a need to use a site specifically created for cataloging books to list the contents of their houses. They can do what they like but I don't think they should expect the site to change to accommodate their irregular usage. Or maybe we should just call it "your stuff"?

Can you explain what you mean by "2. It (the tabs page) is not a link to a separate page, but to a mode of the "Your books" page."? I don't understand that at all.

I have to second this. The tags (and I presume collections) page is completely different than the catalog page. You may implement it as the same page but logically they aren't the same at all. BTW, it was pretty confusing when I was on the tags page and I refreshed my screen and I got my catalog instead.

Let's be as inclusive as possible --- not "Your books" or "Your library," but "Your Things" --- since it is Your LibraryThing to use as you wish (but without a tags tab).

;-)

To quote the T&C LibraryThing is for YOUR books—books you own, have read or want. (underlining is mine). Just because people choose to use LT in other ways to catalogue other things, from DVDs to perfume to clothing, doesn't mean it has to be reflected in the terminology. So, I'm with jlelliott!

Please don't make it 'Catalog', if I have to click on that spelling of 'catalogue' every time I want to access my books, I will end up breaking the computer. 'Collections' I can live with, 'Books' are fine but not 'catalog' please, please, please.

Claire, I agree with your programme about the catalogue. I like the colour scheme but I harbour no resentment to those that don't. I shudder that one page may be different than another. I fear, however, that they may have us outnumbered.

Jim

Gadzooks ... we are outnumbered. But we can fight them on the beaches ... and we shall never surrender!

67>

I would've said the opposite, that "My library" is more neutral than "My books"; in that the latter excludes people who add cds/dvds/etc as well as (or instead of) books.

Another excellent argument in favor of the change to "My books". Off-label uses do not need to be advertised and encouraged.

73> No you are not outnumbered, I read your posts with a massive smile on my face! Please no 'catalog'!

From a catalogue lover :)

Amen Lorax

I won't miss the tags tab, but I do like the idea of a customizable link box/widget on the Home page, sitting on the sidebar. I think it'd be great if we could populate it with a variety of customizable LT links: Tags/Organize page or just one specific tag. Or specific user, a specific library, the group you visit most frequently. That may involve a little coding, and I realize that LT staff are currently up to their eyeballs in coding, but something to think about down the road. I feel like the intent of the home page is a jumping off place to other parts of LT, but the reality is that with the wide variety of ways in which we interact with the LT site and the limited customization options on the Home page, it's not quite equal to the task as it is. Or at least it doesn't feel like it to me.

On Your Books vs. Other Options: I like Your Books. I like Your Catalog better, but I'm a cataloger and it's possible that I may not be representative of the general LT population. But I see the same issue with Your Catalog that exists with Your Library: You, or at least I, do not add items to My Catalog that are not actually in My Library. My Books is slightly more generic and allows for an interpretation of "My" that does not exclude items you may not physically posses. My Things is even more generic, but, really, it's too generic for a site that is focused on books, regardless of how else it's used. It does play on the Thing part of LibraryThing, though, which is nice.

>37 andyl:

Tim,

I have the same problem as andyl with the same browser/OS.

I'm not at home to check my bookmarks, but does this mean you have gotten rid of the original tags page, too?

I have to second this. The tags (and I presume collections) page is completely different than the catalog page. You may implement it as the same page but logically they aren't the same at all. BTW, it was pretty confusing when I was on the tags page and I refreshed my screen and I got my catalog instead.

I can see it both ways. If LT is the "catalog" that people want to call it, catalogs are a "second order of knowledge" thing, and the card for the book and the card for the subject are at the same level of abstraction from the book itself—the first order of knowledge. By this recknoning, tags are just another way to see the contents of your library, like subjects, books, authors, etc.

On the other hand, I've thought of separating the buttons so that list and covers were linked, but organize was off on its own. It could be linked to other forms of organization/analysis, like an author list, a subject list, etc.

Anyway, wouldn't users go insane over Tags/Collections Authors ? How about if it were a drop-down, with Tags/Collections, Authors, Subjects, Series? I think that's the right way to take this feature--to admit into the catalog other second-order descriptors.

Blank tag pages

It's running into an out-of-memory error on very large catalogs with many tags. I'm unsure why, since that code hasnt' changed. I'll get into it this weekend.

Getting to tags from home page

Think with me on how to add this. I suggest we might put links to all three views—list, covers, organize—in the top box, next to the search box. What do people think?

Drop-down navigation would be great, especially if it could provide short-cuts, accessible from EVERY page, to "organize," recommendations, etc. I hope that goes forward.

Yeah. the problem is the catalog. Because we use frames, the menus descend too low. I don't want to get into my usual defense of frames—which for some people is a religious rather than a rational debate—but this is defintely a problem. Once we realize this, we shelves drop-down tags for a while. After collections, anyway.

did the sizing of tags disappear? I used to view with 9 columns and small font in order to view my tags without having to scroll all over the place. Maybe I missed seeing it?

Yes, it did. I'll talk to Chris. He had a reason.

All Collections, Your catalog, etc.

LibraryThing members who are on talk are extreme bibliophiles, who know what "collections" are and who use "catalog" in everyday speech. Both are bad labels for the site to appeal to everyone. Libraries themselves are moving away from "catalog" (and "circulation," "reference desk," etc.) as terms that are now largely inside-baseball terms. There's no reason for us to be chasing after libraries' mistakes.

We are already much hurt by the fact that people come to the site and think it's about connecting to your local library. The "Your library" label has also convinced many--a majority, I think--that it has to be only for things you own. I am amazed at this, but it's true.

It's true that "Your books" suggests LT is for books only. This is not unintentional. We allow other material mostly because we can't prevent it. The LT data model is not good for DVDs. The library data model isn't either, and that's where we get them. It is, however, ideal for stuffed bobcats, and I wonder at Lorax for his opposition to this gentle, noble animal.

Claire, I agree with your programme about the catalogue. I like the colour scheme but I harbour no resentment to those that don't. I shudder that one page may be different than another. I fear, however, that they may have us outnumbered.

Well done. And since you're outnumbered, we're coming to your apartment to cart you off to jail in a truck!

I've decided to omit attempts to fancy, snog and shag you in American English, as that may constitute sexual abuse.

Until Collections finally come out, I think it should be called "tags" instead of "organize".

Maybe. But I'm going to keep it there. I don't need any more tiny little details to change before collections comes out.

Good riddance to the tags tab as far as I'm concerned (and I'm a prolific tagger). I also like the "my books" designation as opposed to "my library"; it seemed like "my library" had implications about the proper usage of LT which everyone interpreted differently, while "my books" is very neutral.

The check's in the mail, bro.

>79 timspalding:
...we're coming to your appartment to cart you off to jail in a truck

So you are going to come to my flat (or, at a pinch, my apartment) to carry me to prison in a lorry?

Two nations divided by a common language(1). Why can't we all just get along(2)?

Isn't it lucky we all love books?

1. Nobody really knows. Twain, Wilde, Shaw?
2. King, Rodney

No, a gaol. Man, English people are weird.

79:

I can see it both ways. If LT is the "catalog" that people want to call it, catalogs are a "second order of knowledge" thing, and the card for the book and the card for the subject are at the same level of abstraction from the book itself—the first order of knowledge. By this recknoning, tags are just another way to see the contents of your library, like subjects, books, authors, etc.

This is from the guy who is saying that "catalog" and "circulation" and "reference" are "inside-baseball terms"?

On the other hand, I've thought of separating the buttons so that list and covers were linked, but organize was off on its own. It could be linked to other forms of organization/analysis, like an author list, a subject list, etc.

Ooh, I like this.

>79 timspalding: Tim

Getting to tags from home page

Think with me on how to add this. I suggest we might put links to all three views—list, covers, organize—in the top box, next to the search box. What do people think?

Way back when the home page was introduced, I thought it would be a good idea if there was some sort of "notes" field that the user could populate him/herself. If links were enabled, then people could enter a link for the tab page, or any other page for that matter. Personally, I would use it to link to several internal LT pages - my challenge thread, my wiki page, Chris's wiki page, the tab page, etc.

83 > I like that!

I suggest we might put links to all three views—list, covers, organize—in the top box, next to the search box. What do people think?

Sounds fine to me. Surely no-one could object to that? *ducks and runs*

Also #83 Talbin's idea is smashing!

I like the idea of having links to all three views in the top box.

This doesn't mean that there's no need for a self-populated 'links' or 'notepad' widget at some point – in fact, I'd almost certainly use that sort of functionality myself – but I think the links to list, covers, and organize need to be front-and-center and accessible to new users.

83: I think there might be spam danger there.

v

I don't see a spam problem with internal links. I really think people should take advantage of modern browsers and externalise their links to different pages of a web site.

For example.

A user's home page can only be seen by that user. So how can spam links be a problem?

91: ah yes - yet another duh moment!

v

OK, I'm just venting, but I have to say this!

I will really miss the Tags tab and for a reason that I don't think others have expressed (but I may have missed a few posts).

After I add books, I click on the "edit book" link and go to the Edit book page to add tags and do all the other customization I do to get the entry to match my book. So I would click on the Tags tab from the work page. Never had to go to my profile page, never had to go my catalog. Now I will have to open one or the other of those and then click on organize. It's not the end of the world, and I'll adapt, but it is extremely annoying!

Also, when I click on Organize from my catalog the Tags list opens with all the headings at the top, but if I click to open it in another tab, none of the top navigation appears. Is this intentional or a bug? (Firefox 3.08, Mac)

>93 rebeccanyc: (about the open in new tab for organize):

I would imagine this has to do with the fact that Tim & Co. hate us all* and used Frames for the top navigation bar.

(* I really do appreciate all you guys do, just had to say it :-)

This works great! I'm ok with two clicks. Once I realized it was just one step less handy, and hadn't gone "poof" I was delighted. Thanks!

::shrug::

Anything to reduce the clutter seems good to me. I'd love to see another tab go. Primarily the "Search" tab and have it replaced with one search box into which I could type anything.

79> "On the other hand, I've thought of separating the buttons so that list and covers were linked, but organize was off on its own. It could be linked to other forms of organization/analysis, like an author list, a subject list, etc."

Ooooh, yes, PLEASE!

There was a thread in Recommend Site Improvements recently (in the last couple days) about being able to see your books clumped by author, actually. And that would be a neat way to access Series too. And...yeah. I'd _love_ to have more different views of the library!

I'd have no objection to having the three buttons in the ID box on my Home page. However, I can access it through Zeitgeist, which works fine for me. And I'd really really like to have that notepad-with-links module - there was one suggested back when the Home page was new (ah, apparently by Talbin) but nothing has come of it (yet). Actually, one use I'd make of it is keeping track of threads that I want to read but don't have anything to say in (saving everyone from haikus!).

And yes, I'd really love to get the text-resizer for tags back. One major reason is that the twitchy is worst on long tags; if I use small text, I can have a reasonable number of columns and still not have long tags run into the next column and make the whole page twitch when I move on and off them. At the current size and with 5 or more columns, the tags run off the bottom of the page and 5-10 tags (rapidly increasing with higher column numbers) make the page twitch. 4 columns doesn't twitch but I've a full second screenful of tags. Annoying. I had it set on Small and 6, and I think they all fit on one screen without twitching - maybe one or two rows overlap.

Whee! went to look at the twitch and found a really weird thing! My tags, set to 10 columns. Hover over certain tags - hmm, it's only Cooking:Microwave and Cooking:Vegetarian that do it (though other tags look just as long...maybe not exactly). As it resizes to allow for the bolding, it moves out from under the mouse - and then unbolds and moves back under the mouse - and back up to bold...Serious twitchy. The whole column blurs, as do the ones after it. Oh, Crafts:Bookbinding does it too. Not really a bug - it's so dependent on size of display, number of tags, resolution, length of individual tags...but it's still seriously weird.

97: (Ah, another person who uses the : system to group tags.)

Moved this comment to a more appropriate thread about the tabs page: http://www.librarything.com/topic/62617

I would like if the sections on the home page could be custom ordered (like google homepage or something where I can just click an arrow to move a box up or down), so that I could move my "top tags" (which I've set to the max so it shows all my tags since I have less than 200) near the top so I don't have to scroll down. Also, I wish the alphabetical matched the other tag alphabetical ordering and went down the columns rather than across the rows. The columns are easier to scan. While thinking of this homepage stuff, I wouldn't mind an option to turn OFF some of the boxes/sections that have stuff I don't care about since I find it quite cluttery.

angorian: you can move the modules around (drag and drop) and remove the ones you don't want to see (uncheck) by clicking 'customize this page' next to your username on your Home page.

I'm with you on the alphabetizing of the tags.

edited to fix typo

On the blank page - how big is "big" supposed to be? I re-indexed today and still can't get mine to come up...I didn't think I was overly big as far as libraries went...

Having "Organize" on the same level as "List" and "Covers" still seems a little odd, as the latter two are lists of books and the former isn't. There are other on the same conceptual level (tag/author clouds, statistics/memes) so I think the best way to handle this would be a tag page link on that submenu (which has Your Home / Your Profile / Etc) as the existing direct tag page links are too far down.

The other thing would be to make it so that if you refresh the tag page it doesn't promptly go back to a list of books.

Thanks agis, that got me thinking.

Tim said, I can see it both ways. If LT is the "catalog" that people want to call it, catalogs are a "second order of knowledge" thing, and the card for the book and the card for the subject are at the same level of abstraction from the book itself—the first order of knowledge. By this recknoning, tags are just another way to see the contents of your library, like subjects, books, authors, etc.

If this is what you want then I think it's odd for you to use List to mean a list of books but bury tags under Organize. You could have a drop-down for List (or maybe View would be better) with the values by-book, by-cover, by-tag, by-author, by-subject, etc.

Tim,

You killed the Tags tab?! Oh, I see --- it is gone, isn't it? I'll try to think of some way that you can compensate me for that vile act of tabicide.

Have I got this right? Your Books = all of the books that you have owned or read; while Your Library = the books in your possession? I guess that makes sense. But those pesky wishlist books just don't seem to fit under either.

You could call the whole thing Your Lists, but people might start adding quarts of milk and loaves of bread. Your LTCat (play on WorldCat) might inspire people to catalog(ue) their felines, complete with uploaded photos. Looking at a Roget's, I find aggregation as a possibility. But it sounds too much like aggravation. You can't win.

Your books are every book you have added to LT (ignoring the non-book things that don't really belong). Your Library is the subset of those books that you feel are part of your own personal library, whatever that means to you.

104> I've changed my mind about my last post. I think the tag page really belongs under Organize because it's main purpose is a way to manage your tags. I would think that a tag view of your library would look something like a list of your tags, one per line with a count of the number of books with that tag and a divit. If you clicked the divit you would get a list of the books with that tag using the columns for the view (A-E) that you currently have selected.

What it comes down to is my opinion that the first order objects of LT are the books and that is what is shown in the List view, and so that is the 1st order view of the data. Any presentation of the data that gets away from the books, like the tag page which only allows you to get at book data besides tags by clicking away from that page, is something different entirely. Which gets back to my original point that I don't believe the tag page should be constructed on the same page, /catalog/username, as the list view of the catalog. It must take a heck of a lot of javascript to make that work.

107 "Which gets back to my original point that I don't believe the tag page should be constructed on the same page, /catalog/username..."

I agree with this. It doesn't make intuitive or logical sense to me. But I'll work with whatever is there.

> 91 spam links can be a problem on your home page, if you include "tag watch" as an option.
(for an example, see this thread)

note: this isn't related to removing the tags tab.

>109 carport: carport - The idea with the "notes" module on the homepage is for the LT user to have a space to enter his/her own notes, including links. Since the home page is only accessible to the user, and since the user would be entering their own links, the only way a user could get spam links in this case would be the user entered them him/herself. Just saying.

I loooove the idea of a 'notes' module with some html, including linkability, enabled. Perhaps this could also include some more generally user-friendly 'common links' suggestions for those who are not html-savy?

I am getting used to the extra step to get to Tags, but just not as useful. I use my tags a lot, a whole lot as ways I have indexed my library on the 25 year road to getting here from the first version of dbase where I started storing the information.

I use tags for year read, genre, series, own/owned, and then like to create smart lists of these. In Filemaker, which I stopped updating once I started using Bookpedia and LT, I had custom scripts to bring up my lists. In Bookpedia I have smart albums.

It would be nice if I could save tag searches in someway that I could have smart albums of my library lists.

"Well done. And since you're outnumbered, we're coming to your apartment to cart you off to jail in a truck!"

Hey, if they want to throw around extra 'yous' like we've had a bumper crop of them, I'm more than happy to see that change reflected in LT, but I draw the line at 'organise'. :)

Here's why I killed the tags tab.

1. In the catalog, "tags" has become "organize." This is because it will soon also have collections on it—allowing you to turn tags into collections, for example. This had to happen. It has happened now.
2. It is not a link to a separate page, but to a mode of the "Your books" page.
3. The main argument for a tags tab was speed—a quick way to get to a list of your tags. I regret that it's now two clicks, but at least the catalog is slightly faster.
4. Interface elements are silent killers. As it is, we have 10 top-level tags. That's a large number. Every option you add, past maybe four, gives you a little more functionality, but adds a little confusion and a little to the impression that LT is over-complex.

Could you dumb down this explanation a little please? Reading it doesn't give me a good sense of what the rationale was for removing this tab, perhaps because I don't really understand what is meant by "interface elements are silent killers", or "at least the catalog is slightly faster". Are you saying that by making it less convenient for people to look at all their tags, less people do it, so the site speeds up because generating the list of tags takes up a lot of computing power? Or are you saying that merely having a tab labeled "tags" at the top of the catalog causes an appreciable slowdown whether or not anyone clicks on it or not? If the latter, why doesn't having a button labeled "organize" also slow things down? And if it is merely a question of cutting down on the number of tabs, why not consider doing this by merging tabs (and having them take you to a page that combines information previously on two different pages), like "talk" + "groups" or "zeitgeist" + "local"? I would guess that more people were regularly clicking the "tags" tab than were regularly clicking any of those four, if I'm right about that it seems rather user-unfriendly to remove "tags" first, especially because users who don't read these groups regularly may not know how to access all their tags now (and new users may not even realize there ever *was* a way to see all tags).

>114 lasermazer:, the key is this: adds a little confusion and a little to the impression that LT is over-complex.

Fewer tabs across the top streamlines things and gives the impression that LT is easy to use. The rest basically says that you've lost nothing since tags were easy to get to from Your Books (formerly Your Library) and from Your Profile.

All we really lost was as established users was a single mouse-click. Hopefully, LibraryThing is giving potential new users the impression we're easy to use through fewer tabs - that's a pretty good gain. It's a real design theory, not just something Tim made up. :)

I see. So they made it *seem* easier to use by actually making it more difficult to use :>

Actually, I don't really care too much about the Tag tab, but I couldn't pass by a setup like that.

>116 jjwilson61: I hope one day that my life is so amazing that single mouse clicks will be what I consider "making things more difficult to use." Ah, what opulent luxury you must live in for this to be your daily toil.

Couldn't resist right back at you! =P

PS - So do you really feel peas under 20 mattresses or is that just a myth? ;)

okay, stopping!

How about "Your LibraryThing?"

I'm interested by that. Some people have used the word in that way--as in "I added X to my LibraryThing today." But I don't think the usage is that common. And I'm concerned it's "cute." What do people think?

83: I think there might be spam danger there.

No, not on the home page. The home page is only visible by you. Well, and by me.

I actually don't much like the notepad-links idea. It strikes me as a typical super-power user idea. It would make 5% of users happy, and do nothing for the rest. That doesn't get me up in the morning.

I see a need for members to get easily into the list, cover and tags/organize part of their catalog. At the moment, I can't provide that in the top-level tabs. But I can add it to the home page.

Also, when I click on Organize from my catalog the Tags list opens with all the headings at the top, but if I click to open it in another tab, none of the top navigation appears. Is this intentional or a bug? (Firefox 3.08, Mac)

They all work this way. It's intentional or anyway expected and not changeable for now. It's a framed environment.

I want to move to a non-framed environment. I don't think there's any actual problem with frames. Opposition is mostly a religious issued, not a rational one. (Yes, I know some disagree. I don't care.) But there's a specific reason to move away from them here—the desire to allow a drop-down menu, with links to subpages. At present, we can't do that.

What it comes down to is my opinion that the first order objects of LT are the books and that is what is shown in the List view, and so that is the 1st order view of the data. Any presentation of the data that gets away from the books, like the tag page which only allows you to get at book data besides tags by clicking away from that page, is something different entirely.

I hear you. I see that point of view. In a classical sense, the books aren't first order because, well, they're not the books at all, but a piece of metadata about the books. In this reckoning, you could conceive of authors as being on the same level, just as the card catalog includes cards for both authors and books. But, yeah, I know what you mean.

Incidentally, you can set your catalog up so that it's not showing "books," but rather covers. Or it's not showing books, but actually just work-level information.

Could you dumb down this explanation a little please? Reading it doesn't give me a good sense of what the rationale was for removing this tab, perhaps because I don't really understand what is meant by "interface elements are silent killers", or "at least the catalog is slightly faster". Are you saying that by making it less convenient for people to look at all their tags, less people do it, so the site speeds up because generating the list of tags takes up a lot of computing power? Or are you saying that merely having a tab labeled "tags" at the top of the catalog causes an appreciable slowdown whether or not anyone clicks on it or not? If the latter, why doesn't having a button labeled "organize" also slow things down? And if it is merely a question of cutting down on the number of tabs, why not consider doing this by merging tabs (and having them take you to a page that combines information previously on two different pages), like "talk" + "groups" or "zeitgeist" + "local"? I would guess that more people were regularly clicking the "tags" tab than were regularly clicking any of those four, if I'm right about that it seems rather user-unfriendly to remove "tags" first, especially because users who don't read these groups regularly may not know how to access all their tags now (and new users may not even realize there ever *was* a way to see all tags).

1. "interface elements are silent killers." Tags are another piece of real estate. Each thing you add feels like it helps people, but the overall effect is to hurt people. Your iPod has only a few buttons and a dial. Wouldn't it be better if it had a special button that jumps you right to podcasts? How about controls for left and right? Base? Treble? Muting? A way to jump to the top of a list instead of tediously scrolling? Etc. etc. Each thing you add gives you new functionality, but it takes away effective functionality.

LibraryThing too could have shortcuts to any number of pages. At one point we had a shortcut to recommended books. When I took it away, people were pissed. But I have to make choices.

2. "at least the catalog is slightly faster." No, I meant that the catalog loads slightly faster. It uses far fewer images and is lighter in some other ways. This means that if you want to go to your catalog and then to tabs, it's a little faster than before. Yes, it's slower than a dedicaed tags tab.

3. "talk" + "groups" or "zeitgeist" + "local." Right. Or books and tags, which were alternate views of the same data before, unlike talk and groups, groups and zeitgeist.

I'm not saying we can't debate what tags should be up. But it's not at all obvious to me this isn't an overall gain.

More generally, the tags tab is a hold-over from when tags was actually a separate page—without controls for switching to list and covers, etc. That separate page moved into the catalog, as a "mode" of the catalog. But members wanted to keep a shortcut. With so many tabs, and with the nature of the page changing to be even more integrated into the catalog, and including collections as well, I didn't think a separate tab continued to make sense in a world of necessary choices.

All we really lost was as established users was a single mouse-click. Hopefully, LibraryThing is giving potential new users the impression we're easy to use through fewer tabs - that's a pretty good gain. It's a real design theory, not just something Tim made up. :)

No, I made it up. I invented it.

Look, ultimately, I want tags with drop-downs for subpages. There are a lot of great subpages that deserve quicker access. At present, however, we can't do drop-downs. So I have to make choiced.

PS - So do you really feel peas under 20 mattresses or is that just a myth? ;)

A single pea!

I guess "Stacks" is too "librarian."

Ha. Can we have a "sex in the stack" button?

>120 timspalding:
Probably not worth it from a maintenance point of view. You'd be forever repairing it when it got worn out!

I can just see it: "Your stacks"

I'm glad nobody is proposing "Your shelves."

>123 timspalding:
That's the joke everyone makes about the "What's on your bookshelf" tagline on the LT tshirt, when it lines up just so...

So, at which point do we start getting scared about never seeing our tags again? After dumping LT cookies, rebooting and restarting a FF session?

Oh, and after reindexing?

Just curious...because I didn't think I was "big" in the library-size...but I'm on perma-white load in FF3/XP. I even broke down and tried in IE 7 and got the perma-white load and then in Safari 3.2.1 and got the same thing.

I don't have any sort of tag editing emergency right now, so I'm good, but it would be nice to know that I could get back to them soon. :)

I'm interested by that. Some people have used the word in that way--as in "I added X to my LibraryThing today." But I don't think the usage is that common. And I'm concerned it's "cute." What do people think?

Yeah, I actually dislike this so much it will probably be the only thing I post about in this whole set of new features. I don't even think it's "cute," because cute doesn't usually bother me. But when I hear "my MySpace" or "my Facebook" it seriously grates. LibraryThing is the site, I don't "have" my own LibraryThing. I have a catalogue and a profile and a homepage, etc.

115>

Hopefully, LibraryThing is giving potential new users the impression we're easy to use through fewer tabs - that's a pretty good gain. It's a real design theory, not just something Tim made up. :)

So Tim says, and I'll admit he reads the relevant literature and I haven't.

Still, though, if I were a new user, I wouldn't see "few interface elements" as "easy to use" -- I'd see it as "feature-poor". I think that's because I assume the most commonly used features should be easy to access, not buried many levels deep in sub-menus, so if there aren't a lot of easily-accessed features I assume they aren't there. I think it's a false simplicity -- people don't see a "Tags" tab, so they don't think there's a "Tags" page. Well, that's simple, but in reality now if they want to find that Tags page they need to know how to get there, rather than having it immediately accessible from anywhere.

I still don't understand why Tim hasn't combined Talk and Groups tabs. Those confused me for a long time after they were introduced -- I couldn't keep straight which was which -- and they're fairly redundant. Many people suggested this last time in the "Kill a tab" thread, but apparently Tim has his reasons for thinking keeping these separate is more important than tags. I just wish I knew what it was.

How about "Your LibraryThing?"

I'm interested by that. Some people have used the word in that way--as in "I added X to my LibraryThing today." But I don't think the usage is that common. And I'm concerned it's "cute." What do people think?

Hate it. Hate hate hate hate hate.

The "books" is a reminder that books are the primary purpose of the site, and at least "your library" was a suggestion that users should at least limit themselves to objects commonly available in libraries. This is cutesy and vague and awful.

Of the proposed names for the former "Your Library" tab - I am partial to "Your Catalogue."

I agree that continuing to use "Your Library" once we have a default collection with the same name will be confusing.

"Your books" doesn't seem inclusive enough once I add my wishlist - which aren't technically "my" books - yet.

"My LibraryThing" sounds more like where I would go to set preferences, etc.

"Your Catalogue" - libraries have "card catalogues" (or they used to) - so this sounds sufficiently "library-y" for my tastes, but the word catalogue is also associated with selecting/purchasing/acquiring things so the wishlist stuff indirectly fits as well. (and while I think that the emphasis on "books" is warranted - the word catalogue is non-exclusionary for the folks who don't want to exclude the DVD-enterers). Also, since many people already refer to the place that you get to by hitting the tab as "Your catalogue" - the term is already in use somewhat.

Not to mention that "cataloging" your books is actually one of the primary functions of LT - so it makes sense to go to "Your Catalogue" to see what books you have catalogued on this cataloging web-site.

I still don't understand why Tim hasn't combined Talk and Groups tabs. Those confused me for a long time after they were introduced -- I couldn't keep straight which was which -- and they're fairly redundant.

I'm with you on that one. I really feel like we should have a more robust talk dashboard of some sort. Frankly, I don't use those tabs anyway and go there from the Home page...but that's just me.

I wouldn't see "few interface elements" as "easy to use" -- I'd see it as "feature-poor".

See, the way I see a new site with a lot of elements is "going to take forever until I get anything useful out of it." More streamlined = easier to hit the ground running.

I also dislike Your LibraryThing, which I'd expect to be something like the homepage rather than a list of books. I wouldn't mind "Your Catalogue", but I don't think that's as welcoming to new users as Your Books. Your Books is clear and straightforward.

On the topic of tabs, I'd lose Local before combining Groups/Talk. The Local page just isn't that important, almost all of the information is available on the homepage, and since not every city even shows any events (especially outside of the US, I think), it makes the whole site look empty and lifeless.

After Local, I'd get rid of the Search tab and instead add a Search box that's always visible, with an Advanced link that goes to the current search page.

130:

Agreed on all points. (But I don't expect we'll win the spelling war.)

Agreed on "My LibraryThing" - yuck.

I don't say "I added a book to My LibraryThing." I say I added a book to LibraryThing."

I'd be okay with either "My Books" or "My Catalogue."

130>

Also, since many people already refer to the place that you get to by hitting the tab as "Your catalogue" - the term is already in use somewhat.

That's because before it was "Your library", the tab was "Your catalog", and old habits die hard.

>135 lorax:

All the more reason. (I'll have to dig up the posts where Tim explains why he changed it originally...)

>133 235711:
(But I don't expect we'll win the spelling war.)

Well, I don't either but my preference is only really aesthetic - I think "catalogue" looks classier somehow (rather like grey vs gray). So when I think of my dream library with thick deep maroon carpets and mahogany bookshelves and beautiful leather-bound books and all the time in the world to curl up in front of the fire with a book - adding the "ue" just sort of fits...(kind of like illuminated script at the beginning of chapters).

I think I like the changes. I missed the Tags tab for a bit, but have recently discovered that the Top Tags links to my tag list. Now I don't need the Tags Tab...I just need to move the Top Tags module up on my Home Page so it's more accessible. Also, I miss the "Your Library" because I use LT as "My Library"...books on shelves and all that. Still, I understand the reasons for making it "Your Books". I think it suits the way the majority of folks use LT. I think my using LT as a shelves-full-of-books-library is in the minority. For me, it's a digital backup to my card catalog.

136:

You've got it all wrong. It's a matter of principle, not a luxury!

When I first arrived on LT, I was initially swayed by the majority usage, but I have since seen the light. I will... have patience... with those who spell "catalog" as though it were an "analog" to blog ("catalogging"?), because I know my own weakness.

I kinda like "My LibraryThing" (or "Your LibraryThing"), but I see I'm in the minority there, so whatever.

But "Your Catalogue" sounds great, and since Tim did away with the "Your Library" and the catalogue one was what it used to be, why not go back to that? It makes sense. And sounds a lot better then "Your books".

I approve of the changes so far. I always kinda wondered why "Tags" had a tab when it didn't seem to merit one.

"Your books" I like, as it emphasises the primary function of the catalog -- that is, books, not DVDs or magazines or diseases or anything.

"Your catalog" is just a bit nothing-y. I don't see it exciting new visitors to the site. People who get excited by cataloguing are probably going to be excited by this place anyway; people who get excited by books are probably going to respond better to "Your books".

140: Oh oh oh, so can I catalogue diseases if I understand that LT doesn't support them?? hehe j/k

I'll live with "Your books" if that's decided to stay, I just don't prefer it.

Since the tag tab feature has been removed, could you replace it with a button somewhere accessable from every page please?

I have no use for local or groups. No use for home that justified the load time. No use for loading up my full library just to access the tag page.

Search and tags are my two ways of accessing my library. I'd be fine with taking all other features away and leaving me those two for ease of use.

I'm grumpy about this, and I'm not sorry. I picked LibraryThing to catalogue my books based on a couple of features, so I hate to have the path to them removed.

Why don't you bookmark http://www.librarything.com/tags/GwenH and http://www.librarything.com/search in your browser? Most browsers will even let you drag the icon from the address bar to one of the toolbars, so you can have your own buttons.

Personally, I like starting in my home page, so that's the page I've bookmarked.

Since the tag tab feature has been removed, could you replace it with a button somewhere accessable from every page please?

It's available from Your Profile and Your Books already...

#143 I've already bookmarked it.

I resent having to go outside a program to use the features I commonly use in that program, but I'll look to see if there's a way to make my own button. I'm back it Explorer, having tried several other browsers, but I don't remember that ability to do that.

Interesting about home page. I've never figured out its use. Prior to home page, I had bookmarked my profile and I still have a bookmark there.

The problem without the tab comes in because I access tags from several places. After or during board conversations. After or during adding books to make sure I'm consistent. If I'm searching info, I start with tags to get my common grouping for what I look for. The way it is now, I need to wait for an intermediate page I don't need to load before being able to go to the page, or alternatively go up to my favorites and reenter LT using the tag link.

Not saying there aren't less convenient ways to get to the same place, just that the one feature I use the most was removed. The only tabs I use are talk, tags, and profile.

The only tabs I use are talk, tags, and profile.

You use profile - then you're a single click away from all of your tags. Problem solved.

@146 Excuse me, but no, the problem is not solved. I now have to wait while an unwanted page loads in order to get to the page I want.

Like I said, it's not that there aren't less convenient ways to get to the same place.

If Tim can be not sorry for removing tags, I can be not sorry for hating that one of my most used features was removed (i.e. the ability to jump back to tags from anywhere, which I used a lot)

I have yet to see a change that I didn't like..
of course there are probably some changes I haven't noticed..
and I am still trying to figure out what the bid deal is with collections.
Basically, I like this place so much, I don't care what color you paint the walls, or use for the furniture..

*shrug*

deleted

But they are two different places, you know.

LibraryThing only has to be like itself, really.

GwenH, you might want to read through the entire thread - much of what you're angry about has been answered by throughout by Tim himself. And because I'm afraid suggesting you use your browser's search capability will set you off, reading the posts around these post #s will help:

1, 14, 22, 26, 79, 118

This should help you. But as to the Library having more than books, LibraryThing's database is optimized for books. Tim doesn't forbid other items, but that's the tradeoff for the great manual entry we have. It's a book cataloging site. Tim's exact quote on that in this thread is in message 14:

Let's not get into the books/not-books issue, frankly. Can of worms.

deleted - etc.

edit - oh by the way, I'd read just about the entire useless thread. Useless in the sense that at the getgo, the decision was already made on the one feature I most appreciated.

Thanks for the reply in #118 Tim--

1. "interface elements are silent killers." Tags are another piece of real estate. Each thing you add feels like it helps people, but the overall effect is to hurt people. Your iPod has only a few buttons and a dial. Wouldn't it be better if it had a special button that jumps you right to podcasts? How about controls for left and right? Base? Treble? Muting? A way to jump to the top of a list instead of tediously scrolling? Etc. etc. Each thing you add gives you new functionality, but it takes away effective functionality.

Aren't the buttons and the dial on the iPod more analogous to the mouse with its button(s) on a computer, in that they're a simple input device that you use to select between options in various onscreen menus? I don't actually own an iPod but from seeing them in use that seems to be how it works. If so, the tabs would be more analogous to whatever the top-level options on the menu would be, as opposed to options you have to go through various submenus to reach (like I imagine would probably be true for adjusting bass and treble specifically). I would guess that Apple probably chooses the top-level menu options based on what iPod users are actually likely to want to do most frequently.

That's what bugs me about the removal of the tags tab, that was the tab I used most frequently out of all of them, to find the locations of books and also to find books whose title slipped my mind or just to browse by subject. Admittedly I may not be very typical in this respect since I have a pretty large library so it's harder to remember what's in there, or where in my apartment a particular book is kept. And now that I know tags are accessible from "organize", the issue isn't really ease of use for me personally, it's more about whether newer members will discover this feature as quickly and realize how useful tags can be as a way of organizing your collection. One other point is that it was easier to figure out how to make a link that went specifically to your tags when there was a separate page for it.

Do you agree with the general design principle of user-friendliness I suggest above, that stuff that people are going to want to use most frequently should be displayed most prominently (which among other things means they'll be the features that new members discover most quickly) and easiest to reach from the starting page? If so, maybe it would be worth it to make some software that keeps track of how often all LibraryThing users are clicking various tabs and other options (if this was possible to do in an anonymized way) to see which ones are most popular, and if you did this you could temporarily bring back some old tabs like "tags" and "blog" to see how they fared. And if software like this isn't possible/feasible, maybe something just like a user poll, which everyone could be alerted to by one of those yellow notices at the top?

3. "talk" + "groups" or "zeitgeist" + "local." Right. Or books and tags, which were alternate views of the same data before, unlike talk and groups, groups and zeitgeist.

They may be "alternate views of the same data" in some sense but they're very different kinds of views, much more so than the difference between listing by title vs. listing by author. "Your books" only show 20 results per page, so for me it distributes them over 130 pages, unlike "tags" which is a top-level view of everything I have organized by the subjects I assign them. It seems to me that "talk + groups" are thematically much more similar, since "talk" just takes you to a page that lists the most recent posts on the groups, and the "groups" page already has a "Most active talk" section that shows you groups which have been active most recently, which is almost the same thing...it would be easy to add a prominent "most recent posts on groups" link on the groups page that would just take you to the talk page.

"Zeitgeist + Local" are not so thematically similar obviously, but I wonder if "Local" really gets used often enough to merit being a top-level tab, looking at what bookstores in my area is not the sort of thing I'm likely to keep coming back to over and over since I can look at it once and see the ones that might be interesting to check out. And even though I live in a medium-sized city (Providence RI) there's never anything in the "upcoming events" section, so I'd imagine that section is only worthwhile for people who live in some of the biggest cities like NYC or Boston.

New issue, I think. When I exported my books as a tab delimited text, my tags are showing up in the review column...is this intentional? Not a huge issue for me in the short term if this is part of the process but I thought I would mention it in case it is an unknown problem.

FWIW, I think 'your books' is much more personal, warm & fuuzy then 'your library' but I really don't get why anybody cares so much about this...as they say ' a rose by any other name...'

154: "Your books" only show 20 results per page": Actually this is customisable, up to 100 books per page, if you click on the cog button on the power tool bar in 'my books' and look down below the style fields bit.

v

Do what you want with the talk/groups tab to streamline the visual aspect of the site or cure redundancy, but please don't remove the Local tab... I know it's useless for some people right now, but I bet there wasn't much under ANY of the fields back in late 2005. Local hasn't been around long, and I'd really love to see more of us getting involved in making it a key draw for new users, and a business booster for small booksellers. I've picked up event flyers from two independent SF stores this weekend so I can plug in their readings, signings, etc... I hope others will think about doing the same, especially in those places where small stores still exist and haven't already been driven out of business by big box and online sellers.

Re: My LibraryThing - I agree with the idea that it seems like a place on the site where I would adjust my settings, or maybe an alternative name for my home page. I like My Books unless and until something that truly and completely means what the page's data IS comes along.

>158 kgriffith: It sounds nice in theory, but when it's been around for more than a year and even a city with 2.5 million inhabitants barely has any event listings, I'm not sure there's much hope.

Even when Groups was brand-new there was always something to see.

>160 _Zoe_: It sounds nice in theory, but when it's been around for more than a year and even a city with 2.5 million inhabitants barely has any event listings, I'm not sure there's much hope.

I wonder if events would be more popular if there was some sort of feedback. For example, what if you could "sign up" for an event? See that 39 other people are interested in that event too? Somewhere prominent, like on the home page module. Maybe even see a list of members interested so you could contact them if you wanted (although this would have to be optional)? I've entered an event or two, but without any sort of feedback I wonder if anyone even notices or cares.

True re: groups, but that didn't require anything more than someone sitting at his or her computer and having something to say about a book. Local requires more than even CK, since much of that can be excised from a book they own, of a site listed inside of it.

I see your point. I'm still holding out hope :)

My LibraryThing

Yeah. I can see it both ways. But I respect that people are creeped out by it.

will... have patience... with those who spell "catalog" as though it were an "analog" to blog ("catalogging"?), because I know my own weakness.

That's raises the question, why don't Brits spell it "blogue"?

"Your books" I like, as it emphasises the primary function of the catalog -- that is, books, not DVDs or magazines or diseases or anything.

There should totally be a LibraryThing for diseases. It would included Date acquired as well as Date transmitted. We could put widgets on your blogs for when our herpes was in remission.

No use for home that justified the load time.

As an argument for the home page, if you never visit it, it has to calculate everything from scratch. My home page is quite quick because I visit it often...

can be not sorry for hating that one of my most used features was removed

That's fair.

Ultimately, it's going to come back in the shape of drop-downs from all the major tabs. We can't add that now, but are planning to soon after collections.

LibraryThing only has to be like itself, really.

I'm going to use that from now on.

Do you agree with the general design principle of user-friendliness I suggest above, that stuff that people are going to want to use most frequently should be displayed most prominently

Yes, basically. At least, I think they should be relatively more easy to get to.

See my next message for some stats.

"Your books" only show 20 results per page

As pointed out, that's your choice. You can show them up to 100 per page.

Argh. Stats are coming, I promise. I have internet problems here, and have retreated to my laptop and its cellphone card.

There should totally be a LibraryThing for diseases. It would included Date acquired as well as Date transmitted. We could put widgets on your blogs for when our herpes was in remission.

What about a Date Stopped field? Would that include both Date Cured or Date of Death, depending on the outcome of the disease? :)

why don't Brits spell it "blogue"?

That does happen for certain discussions e.g. ones concerning the recent dialogue in Vogue about a rogue dogue caught in a bogue in the fogue.

>165 ty1997:

nice.

>>can be not sorry for hating that one of my most used features was removed

>>That's fair.

>>Ultimately, it's going to come back in the shape of drop-downs from all the major tabs. We can't add that now, but are planning to soon after collections.

So why reduce the functionality of the site by getting rid of the tag now? Please let us have our tag tab until you have put the replacement in place.

>MarthaJeanne #169--did you see that the "organize" button next to "list" and "covers" on the catalog page shows you a list of all your tags? Actually, given that "organize" doesn't seem to do anything *besides* show you your tags, I wonder if those of us who miss the tags tab would feel a little happier if the word "organize" on that button was changed to the word "tags"...

I used the tags page to get into parts of my catalog so that I don't have to open the whole thing. I have absolutely no desire to sit around waiting for my whole catalog to load, just because I want to look at a small protion of it.

#170

No point. In a few weeks (we all hope) there is going to be more than tags available from organize when Collections goes in. Considering all the hand-holding and support tasks the new catalogue has generated I think Tim will need to block off the rest of the month when it does.

#171

Well use the "show all tags" from your profile or home page. Or, if you know what tag you want to display, search your catalogue using the search page.

seing "your books" when checking another user books sure is weird... but, hellas, so was seing "your library" :)

That's raises the question, why don't Brits spell it "blogue"?

Because we are fickle and that would almost sound French and we don't like the French and we invented English and we had an Empire and we play football with our feet and we have a Queen ... ;)))

(note the big smiley brackets before anyone delves into an etymological argument)

I'll put the stats up as soon as my internet is back. Among other things it shows the catalog vs. tag ratio at 409,000 vs. 25,000. That's not nothing, but it's a big gap.

What if the collection "Your library" were named "Library"?

It feels stuffy to me. I'd rather have it be "So-and-so's Library" as the collection name. That cold get weird though. Maybe "Your library" if it's yours and just "Library" otherwise.

That works for English, but would need to be done differently for each language site.

We'd do "<SUB1>'s library," which works.

>180 timspalding: Not if SUB1 is a plural, or ends in s, or isn't in English.

And am I the first to offer the serious answer than the Brits (and many/all other commonwealth countries) don't spell blog as blogue for the same reason that they don't spell logbook as loguebook?

In the spirit of seriousness, I think the spelling issue is important. Whilst this is a US-based site, and obviously there will be US spelling conventions used throughout, I think there's an argument for keeping the main access navigation buttons neutral - choose terms that don't have spelling variants across the English speaking world. It makes the site more universal which surely can only be a good thing fo LT. To see a US variant in the main nav of sites, subconsciously suggests that the site is US centric and I think that would do LT a disservice as it is obviously not US centric, despite our joshing.

... and did I mention that we have A QUEEN! ;)

> 181

Pish, you can have an 's following an s if you want. Most style guides mandate it, in fact.

#154 - Re: Events in Local.

If you live in Providence and there is nothing entered for Providence, then you can do so. I think most of the entries in local are from LTer's who live in the area entering the events at their local stores and such.

I don't mind using the Organize button, in fact I think the tags page is even less jumpy than it used to be.

I do have back the 3 null or blank space tags that I can't find. They were gone for a while but now they are back.

I used the tags page to get into parts of my catalog so that I don't have to open the whole thing. I have absolutely no desire to sit around waiting for my whole catalog to load, just because I want to look at a small protion of it.

I'm with you! I'm miffed -- used it all the time!!

>3 timspalding: A link on the home page would work... You said '2 clicks' but LOL I'm clicking away and still haven't found what I want. Will try again.

BTW I really appreciate all you've done here...

Suslyn: there are already several places you can click on your Home page to get to the Tags page. Try clicking Tags, Distinct Tags or Tags/Book under Your Zeitgeist, or the header Your Top Tags.

You can also get there via your Profile: click 'see all tags' at the end of your Tags list.

Okay Tim, I've got it. And, to comment on one complaint (the one I copied before about waiting for the whole catalog to load): you don't. If I click 'your books' and don't wait, but go ahead and click 'organize' voila, there is my tag page. So, the 'miff' is placated.

thx again for all your work here :)

-161 I'm pretty sure you can already do that (sign up to show you are interested in an event).

Local needs a tab because it is completely different type of function, while tags is just a way of looking at your library.

And I'm not really sorry for people who moan about having no events in their area - I'm in a fairly small midwestern city and I've managed to upload quite a few interesting events (even Salman Rushdie!), so I think that in many areas the paucity of events is a function of the lack of effort people put into maintaining that part of the site. Even tiny rural towns can have bookclubs and the like, at least.

#190 while tags is just a way of looking at your library.

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, and I'm resigned to not having a Tags tab, but tags are not just "a way of looking at your library." For me, they are an essential tool in entering new books into my library consistently and I use them every time I enter a book. I also plan/hope to revisit them now that I have so many and possibly add new tags to books I added when I initially joined LT and hadn't thought through a tag scheme. My point is that they play an active role in my use of LT; they're not just a way of viewing my books.

the paucity of events is a function of the lack of effort people put into maintaining that part of the site

Oh, absolutely. But for the new user, it doesn't matter whose fault it is. It just looks really bad for one of the top-level tabs to have pretty much no content.

I'm not moaning about the fact that there are no events in my area. I'm saying that if, for whatever reason, Local doesn't have much content, it shouldn't appear so prominently.

Normally, the only events I see are ones I've added but if I widen my search area then lots of events appear. There is also a place to mark them as interesting so that they show as an item on Local's 'Your Favorites'. Even for small towns like mine Local can be interesting if the LT members in the area are willing to maintain it.

To be honest, for a new user, do they even know they can and are supposed to enter information. Or do they think some magic program goes through and does it automatically ? I am not sure blame is a useful way to get people involved.

Well I think hiding the feature is a guaranteed way of making sure nobody enters information into it.

why don't Brits spell it "blogue"?

I was only going to say because it's never been "ship's logue", but felius said that (I think). There's a difference between the dog in a bog in the fog (chasing a hog) and the dialogue about the catalogue. Perhaps that demmed elusive Pimpernel saved all those French words from having their -ues cut off. The well-intentioned by unsubtle Americans (who were also rather unsubtle in their choice of name for themselves) finished the guillotine job, probably with some idea of equality in mind. They made up for this by preserving the original meaning of the word "mad".

>195 jlelliott: There's a link on the homepage, so it would still be accessible. I'm not saying Local should disappear entirely. But there are only 10 top tabs, and I certainly don't think Local is in the top 10 most important things on LT. New users are probably more excited about Early Reviewers than about Local, and ER doesn't get its own tab.

-197 But if you look in local there are a whole host of options (home, members, favorites, connections, statistics, helpers, add venue and event). Tags is one thing. ER is one thing. They do not encompass a number of functions the way the other top level tabs do.

In my view the tabs aren't there for one-click convenience - they are there as portals to sections of the site with several complicated functions.

>160 _Zoe_: Zoe: "It {LT Local} sounds nice in theory, but when it's been around for more than a year and even a city with 2.5 million inhabitants barely has any event listings, I'm not sure there's much hope."

Zoe - I live in a metro area with close to 3 million people, and my LT Local listings on my home page are usually only 1-3 days out. Many of the booksellers here in the Twin Cities are actively posting on LT Local. And I've checked - it's the booksellers, not just LT members, who are keeping up with posting events.

So, while it might seem like there's "no hope" in your city, your experience is not universal.

I think you make a good point about minimal data being visible making the site look bad, Zoe. Maybe "add venue" and "add event" could be more prominent on the page, or there could be a brief "about local" at the top - which would include the fact that venues and event listings are user-generated - until it's been fleshed out a bit.

>198 jlelliott: Those options are no stronger than the Local page itself. Connections and statistics are both empty for me (actually, I'm wondering whether stats is broken); I know what my favourite bookstores are without checking a website; a list of usernames of people nearby isn't particularly exciting; and information about who's contributing to the site isn't exactly what keeps me coming back here day after day. Having a lot of links isn't enough on its own to make a feature important; it's the content that matters.

>199 Talbin: I do think American cities generally have more events than non-American cities.

I think that Local needs a lot of attention. It's such a significant feature that it really deserves a separate discussion. For the purposes of this thread - the tab should stay where it is.

I just don't understand why "empty" is supposed to equal "broken" or "useless". If the fields are empty it is because one of two reasons - there are no events in your area (sad, but not LTs fault) or you (and your fellow local users) aren't adding them. Neither of those reduces the innate usefulness of the type of information that local is designed to contain.

As for personal interest in the available local information, it is just that - personal. I think plenty of people would be interested to know LTers in their area. Favorites is useful to sort out the types of events you are likely to be interested in from the mess of events that many areas have. Plenty of people also express interest in contributions and statistics. The amount of interest (or lack thereof) that all this has for you does not bear at all on the fact that local encompasses a complexity of information and functions that tags simply does not.

I simply don't understand why the fact that some people live in culturally bereft areas is supposed to make the entire section of LT useless.

This discussion of the Local tab got me curious. You see, since the inception of the Home page, my Local section of Home has been empty of events. This discussion prompted me to go take a look at the Local tab itself, and lo and behold, lots of local events!

It took an edit of the parameters of the Local section on Home to get those events to show up on Home. Now with time I'll see if they refresh properly.

Let's try to discuss the LT issues without insulting other people's homes. The fact that there are very few events listed on LT does not in any way mean that Toronto is "culturally bereft"; far from it.

I thought the statistics page might be broken because it's completely blank. The Connections page has text on it: "Your Connections", "Your Connections' favorite venues", "No venues selected as favorites", etc. I would expect that the statistics page would still contain headings like that, even if there's no data. Also, I'm surprised that there's absolutely no data because the city does have bookstores and libraries entered, as well as a few upcoming events, and there have been other events in the past.

If a page is completely blank, I think it's perfectly reasonable to consider that something might be broken. Things on LT break all the time. It's not necessarily my fault or my city's fault.

I've never argued against the potential usefulness of Local. I just don't think potential usefulness is what people are looking for. I'm not going to be impressed by a new website that has the potential to be useful but lacks enough users to be actually useful. And currently, Local gives a strong impression that LT doesn't have a very active user base, at least in certain areas.

Again, I'm not saying that the Local information isn't of interest to some people, or that no one will get use out of it. I'm saying it's not up there on the same level as the homepage, the catalogue, and Add Books. Personally, I used the Blog tab way more than either Tags or Local, but that doesn't mean I complained when it went away: there was another way to get to it, and I could see that it wasn't a critical part of the site. Removing a tab is not the same as saying that the feature is useless.

>206 _Zoe_:

We're now rather off topic for this thread but...

My connections section of Local is also blank and I know for certain (I just checked a case) that I have "interesting libraries" that have marked favorite libraries and bookstores. So I think it is very fair to assume that the feature is broken. My statistics page is also blank, but since I don't know what is supposed to be there I can't check whether that too is a bug.

>207 eromsted: Did they mark favourite libraries or bookstores within your city? I thought it might be restricted to the local region.

With regard to discussions of tags, tabs, and the recently departed tags tab, I have to say this:

TIM - When you are talking about tags, tabs, both tags and tabs, or THE tags tab, please please please try to type carefully!!! I've seen you do it before, and you've done it a few times in this thread.

Message 1: "As it is, we have 10 top-level tags" - you mean TABS.

In Message 18, several: "Tags are another piece of real estate." - Do you mean TABS here? I think so but am not sure.

And: "This means that if you want to go to your catalog and then to tabs, it's a little faster than before. Yes, it's slower than a dedicaed tags tab" - and here you have "then to TABS" but I think you mean "and then to TAGS."

And: "I'm not saying we can't debate what tags should be up" - you must mean TABS here.

And: "Look, ultimately, I want tags with drop-downs for subpages" - I think you mean TABS again.

Tim, you have a good spot on the list of people I really really like though I've never met them, but PLEASE have some sympathy for users who are actually trying to follow what you're saying, and check your "tags" and "tabs" before you click submit!

180 Not if SUB1 is a plural, or ends in s, or isn't in English.

John—and others who don't see how this works—check out how we do translaitons. We do that sort of thing all the time. The French person would translate that as:

Bibliotheque de <SUB1>

The problem comes if the form of the 's or the <SUB1&gt changes in some clever way. With user names the 's shouldn't change—I don't there are any sites that inflect a user name. That is, if you've chosen the user name "Agricola," you don't expect it to turn into Agricolae (genitive) ever, even on the Latin site.

The only problem therefore arises if the rest of the phrase needs to change based on the user name. So, for example and in theory, in Turkish you'd need to do modify the possessive based on the vowel-harmony of the user's name.

So, for example, Turkish members have translated

<SUB1&gt's reviews

AS

<SUB1&gt'ın incelemeleri

But, I think, the "ı" in "ın" can be ı (undotted i), i, u or ü depending on the last vowel of <SUB1&gt. I don't know how the Turks deal with that. From what I saw, they just always use ın and that's that.

So, while it might seem like there's "no hope" in your city, your experience is not universal.

Social effects are social effects. They tend to move suddenly or never. They clump. As a result LT local is great for some places, and terrible for others. It's the same effect as websites generally--LT has some 40 competitors and their traffic is NOT spread out equally, and not just because they all suck except for LT. But with local that social effect is played out place-by-place. To make something like LT or like local to work you have to "boil the ocean." Once it's boiling, well, it's gonna stay boiling. Okay, inexact metaphor.

Let's try to discuss the LT issues without insulting other people's homes. The fact that there are very few events listed on LT does not in any way mean that Toronto is "culturally bereft"; far from it.

I was just up in Toronto and (1) It's pretty cool, (2) _Zoe_'s home is SOOOO ugly. Those shingles! The green paint!

Here goes the message I couldn't post because we lost internet. Apologies for the length.

Here are some stats. Notes:

1. These are for signed-in members only.
2. The numbers are real, but I won't reveal the time-period. (We don't release all our traffic numbers. It's more than a few days and less than many.)
3. These are real numbers, but it's not always straightforward to decide what to count.

Catalog vs. Tags

I can't give you the use of the "Your library/books" tab versus the "Tags" tab. The way it works those pages don't have JavaScript, because they trigger frames to appear. What I can give you instead is how often people hit the "catalog" and "tags" pages—how often they are looking at them in the lower part of their screen. For tags they could have gotten to them either through the (now departed) tags tab or by clicking tags/organize in their catalog.

catalog pages: 409,000
tag pages: 25,000

Top-level headers

Home pages: 212,00
Profile pages (theirs or others): 253,000
Catalog/Tags: See above
Add books: 211,000
Talk pages: 128,000
Group pages: 120,000
Local pages: 7,000

The stuff on the right is hard to count and also not something I'll be killing or splitting.

From this I draw:

1. Tags are used a lot less than other catalog pages. Given the current structure, I don't see making them a top-level tab. But I think there's a strong case for having a "Your books" drop-down, with list, covers and tags as soon as possible.
2. Add books is used a lot of separate times. I should calculate books added vs. times the page is hit, and chart that going up and down as features are added or changed.
3. Talk and groups are surprisingly even—and used more than I would have guessed. I myself use the top groups page, but NEVER the interior groups pages.
4. Local isn't much used. I knew that.

Local is an interesting problem. The "venue" part of local has been quite a success. There's a lot of data and most active users have favorited a few bookstores or libraries. It has given us a great way to reach out to bookstores and libraries.

The event part is basically a failure, I think. Here and there it's working, because a member or a few members have found it useful and it caught the social-effect loop. But it's just not worth it to most people to add data that will die soon.

I defend it as a top-level for the following reasons:

1. It's something other sites don't have.
2. I think we can do more with it. We just aren't.
3. We have something coming out soon that should raise its profile.
4. We may also be getting a pile of new event data.
5. Because I say so.

I get to win one, and this is the one I'm winning. I think local is an amazing collaboration. It's produced something that's never before existed--a comprehensive map of bookstores and libraries, together. Treating the book world as a unified whole is exactly what LT is all about. And I'm going to give it every chance to succeed I can.

Aglaia raises the point about indies and bookstores generally. Living in a town—Portland, ME—that's about to become a one-bookstore town--one new bookstore anyway--with the closure of a beloved, 37-year-old indie, I'm just not prepared to draw LibraryThing's ladders up and fill in the moat, to collaborate in long, desperate retreat of books and book culture to exclusively online venues. The book world is both physical and online. Now, if bookstores--particularly indie bookstores--could get overthemselves, stop lying down before the Amazon steam-roller and and participate in the online world in a real way...

For interest here's the profile sub-nav, except for "Home" and "Profile"

Connect: 3,762
Recommendations: 10,770
Reviews: 10,480
Stats + Memes: 28,937
Tagcloud: No tracking data because of error
Gallery: 2,613

The surprises there are:

1. Connections is low still. In my own experience I watch the connections part of the home page a lot. I don't visit the page so much.
2. Recommendations is high considering it's high on the home page too.
3. Stats and memes is higher than I thought. I'm very happy to be working to improve that now.
4. Tagcloud. Forgot to add the JavaScript. Bad Tim.
5. Gallery. You guys hate authors.

Okay, back to conversation!

>208 _Zoe_:

The case I checked was LT user alibrarian whose library I have marked as interesting and who has several favorite venues in New York City. I just tried changing my LT Local location to New York, NY and still nothing. Perhaps waiting is required, but so far it looks like its not working.

Where are you changing it. I have it set for NYC and my local page looks like an alien attack.

We were not talking about the map, but about the "Your Connections" and "Statistics" sections of Local. Should something be showing up on those pages? If so, what?

Statistics should be blank at present. I'll kill the page.

Your connections... I'll check on it.

Thanks for all the interesting data!

_Zoe_'s home is SOOOO ugly. Those shingles! The green paint!

This made me laugh :)

Local isn't much used. I knew that.... I defend it as a top-level... Because I say so.

As long as you know that your decision is based on what you want Local to be rather than on its actual success, I'm still satisfied that I had the better argument :P

I do think there are certain easy things you could do to make Local better. Since its strength is venues rather than events, you should build on that. Give us more ways of looking at the venues: it should be possible to sort them by how many people have favourited them, by how many comments they have, how many events they've held, etc. It should be possible to see things like number of favourites, comments, and past events without clicking on each bookstore separately. Maybe the main Local page should be reworked to focus on user interaction rather than a static list of bookstores. Show us the 5 most recent user comments, the 5 most recent members in the city, the 5 most recently favourited bookstores, etc. There could be a lot more to the page than a few events and an unchanging list of venues.

Connections is low still. In my own experience I watch the connections part of the home page a lot. I don't visit the page so much.

Well, I've told you a million times what my problem with Connections is: it just doesn't show the information that I care about most (though I'd probably still look at it mostly from the homepage even if it did).

Gallery. You guys hate authors.

I looked at it once, but I don't really see the point in going back frequently.

Gallery. You guys hate authors.

Providing author pictures is a frustrating job. They can disappear without apparent reason, they don't (always) get taken along on author combining, author pictures that are there don't always show in gallery...

I think we need to drop the copyright rule. Nobody else on the web asks for it. They just rely on the safe-harbor of the DMCA, which allows a site to pretend it doesn't know that it's full of copyrighted material so long as it take the stuff down when asked.

I have a letter from Shel Silverstein's estate, threatening legal action if we use any photos or quotes. This was after asking politely. Our main competition has a page covered with photos and quotes, and nobody does anything. Then people say we don't have author photos. Fuck it.

This was after asking politely.

After you asking them politely for photos?

Yeah. Asking if we could use one.

Actually, a user did it. I knew it would come back negative. I'd worked with them before, trying to get content for an ebook when I ran Houghton Mifflin's educational ebooks. The Silverstein estate is rabid.

Incidentally, I told Otis of Goodreads about the Silverstein thing. He got rid of it. It was back soon. That's life.

Honestly, I really think we should stop trying here. Being the only site that aggressively enforces copyright makes us look bad.

I thought so. But it could have been interpreted as "they threatened after they asked nicely".

I think we need to drop the copyright rule.

Okay, but there are also some bugs. For example "Magnus, Olaus" used to have a picture until he got combined with "Olaus Magnus". Also, not all pictures appearing on author pages get to be shown in the gallery (Abba Eban for example). Not a huge deal, but frustrating.

218 / 220 > I agree. Also, IMO a lot of user-contributor upsetness is generated by flagging on the copyright rules, which, frankly, often appear to be misunderstood and over-applied in a stickling fashion.

Flagging should be what you do as a last resort when someone won't cooperate, after you have asked nicely. Not the first thing you do, and then never say a word so the other person has no idea what is going on, or where there picture went.

Gallery. You guys hate authors.

No, I just don't particularly care what they look like. I only care what their brains are like. I was always mystified by the existence of the gallery - I can see wanting an author photo on the author page, but a page of nothing but author photos ... why?

-281 Yes please, that sounds like an excellent idea.

224 : if only!

226: i completely agree. i've gone to that page maybe 3 times, out of idle curiosity to see if i cared, and each time i don't, really. it's pretty for a few seconds and then "whatev."

but your comments makes me think: no, author images aren't all that, but what *would* be kind of fun? maybe, author images interspersed with book covers in a screen saver? (i did one like that for octavia butler a while back.) or maybe fun facts about an individual author tailored to your own collection.

Or, to come back to the author pictures, maybe an author cloud using the author's pictures, sized to frequency in the catalog. Ursula Le Guin would have a giant face in my cloud and Ray Bradbury would be really really tiny.

As more authors are added the chance of an author page containing multiple authors with the same name increases, and whose picture do you use then? Another reason to get a move on with revamping the author system.

One thing you could do to improve the usage of local is to make it easier to add events. My understanding is that recurring events are a problem or was it multi-day events. Maybe it was both. Also, maybe a better way to categorize events so that weekly children's events at libraries can be filtered out and they don't overwhelm everything else.

#228: No not an author cloud. An author group picture! Great idea!

220> Tim any idea of a when for a decision? Days, weeks, months? You may want to start a new thread to get feedback. I'd love to add more photos, but it can be a lot of work. I might just go photo crazy if copyright restrictions are lifted.

Honestly, I really think we should stop trying here. Being the only site that aggressively enforces copyright makes us look bad.

Excuse me -- must protest. Enforcing copyright, and better yet agressively enforcing copyright, makes me love this site! You go guy.

That's a very attractive feature of LT for me. Might be influenced by the fact that most of my tons earn part of their living from copyright revenues, although mostly in music.

233 > Excuse me -- must protest. Enforcing copyright, and better yet agressively enforcing copyright, makes me love this site!

The problem is that these uses aren't, strictly speaking, the kinds of uses that copyright is designed to protect or create profit from. So abiding by the letter of the law here doesn't help copyright holders. And that's ignoring the fact that the posting of author pictures on LT is pretty much protected by the law in multiple respects.

We're not talking about posting the full text of books.

What are "tons"? as in most of my tons earn part of their living ... ?

>211 timspalding: "But I think there's a strong case for having a "Your books" drop-down, with list, covers and tags as soon as possible." -Tim

That would be faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaantastic! I'm so enthused by the prospect, I'll be deleting my whiney "woe is me, I'm lost without my tags tab" blather post haste.

I preferred Your Library but can live with Your Books. If I can't have Your Library, though, I'd prefer Your Catalog (or Catalogue).

I hate that the Tags tab has gone away. I use tags alot and was used to the website the way it was. I'm not particularly fond of change. I can get around it, obviously, but it's a big change in my use of LT. I'll probably be fine in a couple of months, but for now I'm irritated.

And the reason it's being done won't even benefit me. I'm one of these people who only put books I own on LT, except for the ER stinkers that I've gotten rid of but have to keep on my catalog so that the ER gods know I wrote reviews. So, I am not chomping at the bit for Collections. (Yes, I know lots and lots of people want it. Just not me.)

Tags do everything I need to have done.

Just thought I would pop in after all the excitement to say that, for me, the changes are fine. I am one of those who sees something new or different, goes "huh? oh, that's what I need to do now" and thereafter forgets there ever was a change. Umm... I suspect I am in the (silent) majority. (But then, I also don't care if my books have creased spines, so long as the pages don't fall out.)

I'm another person who prefers "Your Library" followed by "Your Catalogue"- "Your Books" is just blah to me...

Since we have a lot of naysayers now I'll cast my vote in favor of "Your Books". No preference between the "Your Library" and "Your Catalog(ue)", but hate hate hate (as previously stated) "Your LibraryThing".

Maybe... "Your Things"

Just kidding, just kidding!

Ooops, previously suggested...missed that. Guess that's two votes. ;)

I should clarify- when I think of "your books", I think of books I actually own. If I want to include in my collections "wish list books", or "books I checked out of the library" or "books I read but donated to charity" etc, I just don't think of them as "my books" because I no longer own them. I could however think of them as part of my lifelong "library" or "catalogue". Realistically, I'm here to stay no matter what Tim calls it, but if it is up for negotiation, I think lots of us have suggestions.

I do wonder why it is "your books" and not "my books" though...

> 241: Well, it is also "your profile" and "your home". For the rest I fully agree. Like you I only think of the books I actually own as "my books".

How about "Your Thing" - I would love to be able to say I was just doing my thing ;-)

Add my vote for Your Books which is what my part of the database contains.

I feel like the word that might be causing the most problem is "your." It's possessive, and, obviously, implies ownership. Books, Libraries, Things, LibraryThings are all words that imply physical items and therefore imply actual ownership of said items. "Catalog" really just implies a list of items you own, so it's not a solution. Two solutions that I see:
1. Get over "Your (blank)." You know it doesn't mean you own it if that's not how you use it.
2. Choose a word that truly does not mean or imply a physical object. "Your Lists" perhaps, but that seems too generic. "Your Lists of Books That You May or May Not Own, May or May Not Have Ever Touched, May or May Not Have Ever Read or Intend to Read and/or Buy, and Maybe Lists of Other Things Not Books Including But Not Limited to DVDs and Taxidermy, but We're Not Endorsing That."
That's probably too long for one tab. ;-)

My solution is to recognize that LT is not Amazon or any other retailer. They don't grant me ownership of any physical items (okay, maybe a t-shirt and a sticker), so "Your (insert noun here)" might carry an implication of ownership, but in the context of the site it can only mean, "Your (insert noun here) that you track on LibraryThing."

"Your Books" is fine by me. "Your Catalog" as well, but slightly less so. Anything else, I'm sure, will be fine, but "Your Amorphous Concepts Arbitrarily Grouped" is a little too wordy for me, and would eat up a lot of screen real estate.

#244

oooh Your Concepts, or My Concepts

I like it :)

I dunno, "Your Lists of Books That You May or May Not Own, May or May Not Have Ever Touched, May or May Not Have Ever Read or Intend to Read and/or Buy, and Maybe Lists of Other Things Not Books Including But Not Limited to DVDs and Taxidermy, but We're Not Endorsing That." has a real ring to it...

;-)

I much prefer Your Books to any other suggestion I have seen. Well okay, I like the one in Message 246, but aside from that, I like Your Books the best. I also very much like the new look of things. Maybe a little thicker line on the new icons but, if not, I can deal.

eta what I originally meant to post. I use the tag page a lot but I don't mind the loss of the tab.

I don't miss the tags tab - I usually got to tags from Profile. Your Books is cool with me, I know what it means, and it doesn't make the little hairs on the back of my neck go up.

Your Concepts? Certain folks will be referring to that as Your Torments or Your Clones in no time...

My little booky?

How about "My Cute Librarian Stuff" ???

This can be read as

My (Cute {(Librarian) Stuff})
- my cute stuff which either is librarian in nature, or pertains to (a) librarian(s)

or

My ({(Cute) Librarian} Stuff)
- my stuff pertaining to (a) cute librarian(s)

or

(My {Cute} Librarian) Stuff
- stuff pertaining to a cute librarian who is (in some sense of the term) mine

so I'd say no, probably a bad idea.

That is not the purpose of LibraryThing, and probably illegal as well.

Well, if you're going to nitpick....

Paging Hannibal Lecter, paging Hannibal Lecter.

Depends on what you stuff him/her with. Turkey? Cadbury Creme Eggs?

How about making it 'Your (variable)' where (variable) is defined in the user's profile. So mine can be 'Your Library' and someone else's can be 'My Catalog' and someone else's can be 'My King Tut'.

I am kidding, mostly.

That would need a character limit, or people are going to put in some of the lengthier titles and make the tab run right off the screen.

Whatever the character limit, it should allow for "My Catalogue". Because I demand it.

ETA:

Argh, what did I say? I meant Your Catalogue. I blame the cute librarian stuff.

It could be programmed to variable font size based on number of characters, so if someone chose "My Supercalifragilisticexpialodiciousalistic Carnival of Disenfranchised Antidisestablishmentarianism" it would print in font size 0.2 so it would fit.

(Really though, I don't think having the tab title customizable is a great idea overall, even though it would solve the problem of everyone seeming to want a different tab moniker)

(edited in a failed attempt to make long words fit)

#260: Doomed to fail. People will want to set different font and font size for each character. Encapsulated Postscript is clearly the way to go. Now where did I put my Turing machine emulator in Postscript?

How about just "Mine" or "Mine, Mine, Mine"

"Mine, All Mine" ?

"Precioussssssss"

I was going to suggest "We Wantss It" for wishlists.

Pocketses

267, for the win!

> 268 Second that

By the way, for anyone who liked the layout of the "old" tags page, I noticed you can still get to them by going to a URL of the form http://www.librarything.com/tags.php?view=yourusernamehere (obviously substitute your own username for "yourusernamehere")

#270 interesting lasermazer. I feel like I'm going dumpster diving for some reason when I look at that old discarded page. I do miss the text that stays in one place and you don't have to chase after it to click on it, haha.

I'd love just to have text sizing back again for the current tag page.

Wow. I tried to follow this for a while, but we're almost at 300 posts, so I've given up and skimmed a few.

"Recommendations: 10,770"
"2. Recommendations is high considering it's high on the home page too."
Perhaps an argument to add back the recommendations tab???? {ducking for cover} ;)

Seriously, though, this does show that a lot of people are interested in the full recommendations page. In fact, that's part of what got me to LT in the first place: I found someone extolling the quality of recommendations you got here, because it was based on books you had in common with other LT-ers. I actually used to go to the recommendations page a lot more often when it was accessible from every page as part of top-nav. If you do figure out a way to drop-down menus for top navigation, this would be a very good contender....

# 267:

> Pocketses
>> Mine, All Mine
>> We Wants It

Yeah, that's the ticket

That's all very well, my Precious, but on another thread, I just hear Chris say that Collections would be released... arhh, gollum gollum, argh!

OK, move along here. Nothing to see here, move along.

Okay, back to "Your books", "Your library", etc.

Ordinarily I don't believe I would care about such a thing, but it occurred to me today that I do indeed prefer "Your library". Yes I know Tim thinks it's musty-sounding, and I'm sure it makes the tab uncomfortably long.

But I felt so much more special clicking on a tab to see my "library" than simply on a tab to see my "books". If my "library" numbers in the thousands it feels like a respectable small library. If my "books" number in the thousands it feels like, I don't know, an out-of-control consumerist obsession or perhaps like my own personal little Ponzi scheme, defrauding, I can only assume, me.

For the sake of my self-esteem, therefore, I cast a vote in favor of "Your library".

What, the polls closed? Crap.

>275 lquilter:
Maybe it depends on how many cats you have.

... I have five, but I'm pretty sure that they only like the computer(s) and not the books. Well, they like the books to make hairballs on. *grimace*

If my "books" number in the thousands it feels like, I don't know, an out-of-control consumerist obsession or perhaps like my own personal little Ponzi scheme, defrauding, I can only assume, me

I love this, you've just made me laugh out loud lquilter! And I'm glad that I'm not the only one with the odd hairball-damaged book ...

Three places not to puke: bed, shoes, books - everything else is survivable. I have been known to move a cat in mid-heave. Very unhappy cat.

I am finding the lack of a Tags tab increasingly annoying -- how exactly am I being benefited by having to click twice when I used to only have to click once? But I just realized that some functionality appears to have disappeared along with this change. There used to be a group of untagged books listed as "no tag" at the end of my tag list. I used to click on that to tag all my untagged books once I had a number of them accumulated there. It now appears to be gone. Am I overlooking this somehow? If not, can we get this back? Please?

(And yes, I know I can sort my books by Tag and the untagged books will show up at the top, but that's a pain in the neck. I'd really like to be able to do this the old way.)

And add my vote to the list of folks who want "Your Books" to be "Your Library."

I don't mean to be a "boo bird," but from my perspective, this round of changes sucks.

There used to be a group of untagged books listed as "no tag" at the end of my tag list.

bibliorex, I'm seeing two books marked (no tag) at the end of your tag page (sorted alphabetically/down). Is that what you were looking for?

Clicking twice - oh noes! Books v. Library v. user's heart's desire.

Do you laugh as much at these threads as I do Tim. Hopefully you do.

When I was a kid, we didn't have clicks. We took a bus to the Library and made lists on dead tree detritus.

When did get clicks, it took us four clicks. Uphill. Both ways.

Why in the good old days of the internets, I remember when we would have been happy to get anywhere in less than 80 clicks - and no one had ever heard of a back key, and we were happy!

Ah the 90's...

loading...
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>281 mountebank:

No, I can't see those two books at the end of my tags page, sorting alphabetically/down. I desperately want to see them, I believe that they're there, I believe that you see them, but I can't see them. Tried on both my machines, running XP and Firefox on one, Vista and Chrome on the other; no dice with either configuration. Very, very strange. No idea what the problem is.

>282 Bookmarque:

Yeah, yeah, I know I'm whining about the extra click, but why not? It annoys me significantly, LT asked for feedback, and I'm giving it.

>286 bibliorex:

I just noticed I have the same problem. I can see the (no tag) tag on your organize page, but not on my own. So it's definitely not just you.

>287 The_Kat_Cache:

Thank you for making me feel less crazy! :)

>288 bibliorex:

No problem. :)

286, 287> Very strange, indeed! I just removed some of my tags to test and can see my (no tags) just fine.

In case it's a browser thing: Safari, OS X 10.5.6

*smacks forehead*

Oh dear. I just realized I had no books without tags. I took tags off one and, yep, my (no tag) tag appeared. Oops.

Ah. I got it. It's when you do it alphabetically, not by frequency.

Shall I put (no tag) at the end of alphabetical?

Yeah - it's not a tag, it's a lack of tags. So it should be at the end of the list whichever way you go.

292: Yes

And what shall I call the room with the books. My bookroom or my library ? My library (mitt bibliotek) of course and I want this in my "bookroom" in librarything too, so you know. It is my library. punctum est

> 292: Yes, I'd appreciate it if you put (no tag) at the end of alphabetical. I tried sorting by frequency, and (no tag) shows up there at the end, though not when sorting alphabetically. Weird, but thanks for looking into this, Tim.

No preference at all on Your Books vs Your Library vs Your Catalog.

I did regularly use the Tags tab and it was while loading new books. I can never remember what tags I'm already using. So most ideally would be a way to see my tags actually on the Add Books page. But it's already a little cluttery, so I'm not sure where they could go. But it would be very nifty.

In the meantime, I'll just keep two (Firefox) tabs open, one for Add Books and one for my tags page.

PS - It didn't occur to me that Organize was the new name for tags on the Your Books page, even with the little graphic.

>298 kristenn:
Yeah, that threw me too.

It will be the new name for Tags and Collections, when Collections finally debuts.

Well, the only fly in the ointment is that I'd like to add an "authors" feature, which would be another way to organize. I'm thinking on it.

>301 timspalding: And "publishers" too? (in the long term)

Right, and subjects, languages, shoe sizes. Any data in LT can be represented in this way—so you can pick all the books that are X at one time, and so you can change all the tags applied to some category. Think Flickr's organize feature, if you know it.

That is just the model I seek.

ETA: Except that my books lack shoesizes. But that could be important for the bobcat.

Bobcats wear shoes? I wouldn't want to try putting shoes on them!

>305 Heather19: They do in the UK.

The (no tags) bug should be fixed. It was calculating them against the zero-collection, which is books not in the "Your library" collection. You don't have any of those, but I do, so it was hard to track.

My open catalog bugs list is empty! ( http://etherpad.com/TMLWRW2RSs ). Note, catalog bugs.

>307 timspalding:

Thanks, Tim! It definitely appears to be fixed now.

I noticed text sizing is back, but I still can only get 6 columns instead of the 9 I used to have before without side to side scrolling. Mystery. Also with small text I have to scroll up and down where I didn't have to before. Ah well.

One new thing taking up space is an icon to the left of each and every tag. I already know they are tags. Is there some future purpose for these?

One new thing taking up space is an icon to the left of each and every tag. I already know they are tags. Is there some future purpose for these?

Yes. That's the probably the problem for you. It created a lot of new space. The point is to distinguish between tags and collections—a different image.

I like the new icons by tags. It's a visual aid to help me distinguish tags from each other--a particular problem for those of us who use multi-word tags.

I also like the icons for exactly that reason lquilter.

Good to know there's a reason for them beyond "for pretty."

Has "Organize" changed back to "tags" in Your Books?

I missed a bit of this thread, but have followed most of it, and have missed any reference to this. But at this time, "Your Library" has a "Tags" button where there used to be an "Organize" one, and the tooltip text says "tags and collections."

Am I daft? I believe it said organize yesterday.

Yes, it changed back. I think Chris and I missed each other on who was supposed to talk up some changes:

1. Organize became "Tags" again. I decided that people need the clue, and it will always have tags on it.

2. The sort, power edit and printable versions lost their text. We need the space for the collections buttons, and they were taking up more mental room than they should ahve.

Thanks. I noticed the change to sort as well, but once again thought my recollection (of the way it was displayed) might be wrong.

If we could vote, I would vote for "My Library." A much earlier post made a good argument about how a library could be considered a collection of collections, including books owned, books read but no longer owned, books wishlisted, etc. My Books definitely seems to limit the whole thing to only books I own.

I think it is very odd to have the tab say "Your" anything. From my point of view, the user's point of view, it is "My Whatchamacallit." If I am perusing someone else's library, it might be more appropriate to call it "Your Library," but even then, it is "His/Her Library" from my perspective.

In my day job, I am a user-interface expert, and we put a lot of thought into what a gadget is called and how it will be used by the end user. We even run usability studies of new functionality to make sure it is discoverable by the end user. Perhaps a small focus group could look at issues such as this?

Everywhere else that the site is referring to the user, it says "your" or "you". For example, as I'm writing this there's a block of links at the top left of the page that say "Your World", "Your books", "Your groups", "Your posts", and "Your starred"; the Touchstones text at the right refers to "your message" twice -- would you change these to "My"? When you log in, should the site greet you by saying "Enter my username"?

As a user-interface expert, which would you prefer -- changing a single instance of "Your" to "My", changing all instances of "Your" to "My", or leaving it as it is?

(I don't claim to be an expert in anything, but I've been designing and developing computer software UIs for more than 20 years, and I know which I'd choose.)

I do agree with you about viewing someone else's library, though. That should be clearly distinguished from your own. "username's Library" would be my choice, although that could lead to layout problems with longer usernames.

nooooo! "my books", "my messages" etc is awful! It sounds like "I'm the only person on the site and it's my own business what I will do with my books because no one cares anyway." It takes the interactive aspect of LT away. I like the illusion that there's another person there to greet me. "Your books" is much much better because it sounds like someone else is there saying "Hello Eliza! These are your books" rather than just me saying "Aha! These are my books!":) If that makes sense.

agree with girlunderglass / #320. As I've said elsewhere, I really loathe the convention of third parties naming something "my computer". It's patronizing, makes assumptions, and is frankly not intuitive. The name is "my computer" whether you're on your own computer or someone else's, for instance. I don't need or want user interface to speak in my voice, especially when I have not labeled or programmed them to do so. I actually find it rather offensive. "Your library" is vastly, vastly preferable.

eta: I'm really only talking about the difference between "your" and "my" -- not the choice of "library" or "books". I somewhat prefer "library" over books but I greatly prefer "your" to "my". Rank preference:
#1 "Your library"
#2 "Your books"
# ....
# 103 "My library"
# 104 "My books"

Tim said somewhere that the reason why Your Library changed to Your Books is that "Your Library" is going to be one of the default collections.

All this your and my still confuses - for instance, in statistics, one section is for books that fit the catagory "yours and no other". "Your" seems to be defined differently there. I only comment on this because of the discussion about consistency. Already the site appears to use the terms inconsistently. If "your books" are my books, the "Yours and no other" should be the book that only I have, while "Yours and one other" would be books that I share with one other person.

That said, I find "your books" less obnoxious sounding than "my books". "My books" seems childish to me for some reason.

"You and no other" is the one case where the word "You" is used to mean someone other than you, the reader: in this instance, it means the other person that has the book. That particular case has been confusing people for years.

in this instance, it means the other person that has the book

In that case it would be just that other person and none other, so not me either. So I guess it uses "you" as a plural - but in that case it could be applied to every book (since there's no upper limit to that plural). Why have most modern western languages abandoned the "dualis"?

I get that "you and none other" is one of Tim's little quirky things for whatever reason, but it is confusing and it doesn't make sense with what "you" means everywhere else on the site.

I think it's supposed to be you speaking: "(unspoken me, meaning you, the reader, and) You (the other person with the book) and none other".

Edit to add: And yes, it is confusing.

There's no point arguing about the "you and none other" since they've changed that anyway - they now have the original French saying, which makes much more sense. At least new users can google it and understand what it means now rather than guess that it's just a translation of a French expression.

My "you and none other" is now, apparently, unless I'm looking at the wrong thing:
"Vous et nul autre"

Oh, I didn't realize it had been changed. Never mind what I said, sorry about that.

Except that an awful lot of people will know enough French to translate those few words. I saw that and figured it being in French was a bug.

I didn't even notice it until it was mentioned here. I even asked my son what it means since he took French. We looked it up on line and it seems to mean "you and no other". I don't think I would have noticed it if it wasn't mentioned here.

That's correct. I don't actually think it makes more sense in French than it does in English, but at least it signals that there's something out of the ordinary.

>332 crazy4reading:

yeah, it's like saying "Je vous aime. Vous et nul autre." (I love you. You and no other.) if you say "I love only you" it is implied that both of you are involved in that love, that you share it. hence, "Vous et nul autre" means you share the book. yes, it's a bit strange, but it's a TimThing....

A TimThing! Love it!

Most developers are justifiably proud of their creation which often leads them to a "Let me show you this!" mindset. So they are saying to the user, "This is where you go to see a list of your books and here is where you see your groups", etc. But a good, discoverable user-interface does not require handholding. A new user should be able to come to the site and say, "Ah! That's where my books are and there are my tags." It's all a point-of-view thing.

I did notice that Windows Vista did away with the My Documents and My Pictures naming scheme, though. Now the folders are simply called Documents and Pictures. Maybe the tab could be changed to Library, but that doesn't help distinguish my books from everyone else's books.

No matter what the tabs are called, they will never satisfy everyone, but a laudable goal for all software is to be user-discoverable and to require the fewest possible references to the help or forum for assistance.

In case you're wondering, I have been in the computer software industry for more than 19 years and the products for which I design GUI sell from $1500 to $12,500 per seat.

> countrylife

i almost went with Timism, but TimThing was just too perfect.

Most developers are justifiably proud of their creation which often leads them to a "Let me show you this!" mindset. So they are saying to the user, "This is where you go to see a list of your books and here is where you see your groups", etc. But a good, discoverable user-interface does not require handholding. A new user should be able to come to the site and say, "Ah! That's where my books are and there are my tags." It's all a point-of-view thing.

This isn't a good argument for any particular feature, let alone top-level tag tabs. It could be extended to any number of other features. These are my books, and these are my covers, and these are my subjects and these are my series and, and, and. "Your tags" are an aspect of your books, just like those other aspects. They are important, for sure, even if only half of users use tags, and use of the tag-list feature is much less frequent than use of the book-list feature. Their importance is, however, why they get better billing. But do they deserve a top-level tab separate from "Your library," particularly when they go to what is essentially the same interface page? (It's a mode of the page, and has been for more than a year.)

In case you're wondering, I have been in the computer software industry for more than 19 years and the products for which I design GUI sell from $1500 to $12,500 per seat.

I'm not saying LibraryThing has the user interface it should have, but enterprise software is not generally known for its user interface. Indeed, interface quality and cost are often inversely related. Basecamp and Flickr are virtually free. Lotus 123 costs big money :)

>332 crazy4reading: I translated it into Catalan as "Amb tu i amb ningú més", something like "With you and with no one else". Love is still in the air but I think it's much clear.

> collectorator

as a Tennessean living in Texas, i'm right there with you

"Your tags" are an aspect of your books, just like those other aspects. They are important, for sure, even if only half of users use tags, and use of the tag-list feature is much less frequent than use of the book-list feature. Their importance is, however, why they get better billing. But do they deserve a top-level tab separate from "Your library," particularly when they go to what is essentially the same interface page?

I only used "Your tags" as an example. I haven't weighed in on the issue of removing that tab, although I did miss it at first. My posts have to do with the use of "your" vs "my". I still contend that from the user's point of view, these things should all say "My". From the developer's point of view, it is "Your", and that is the difference.

Indeed, interface quality and cost are often inversely related.

So true! I only mentioned it so you would know that I know a little whereof I speak! I'm sure it came across as pompous...

To tell the truth, I love LibraryThing, and I will use it no matter what the tabs say. I was just giving my opinion. (My coworkers tell me I can always be counted on to have at least one!)

>341 Collectorator:
As a Broooklynite whose attachment to Texas is tenuous at best, I'm right there with you too.

I still contend that from the user's point of view, these things should all say "My". From the developer's point of view, it is "Your", and that is the difference.

Not exactly true, as proved by the fact that the two comments right after you posted the suggestion to switch to "my" - posted by users - completely disagreed and said they prefer "your" So far between users who have opined on the matter: you me and lquilter - it's 2-1 who prefer "your".

My point is you don't see it from the users' point of view, you see it from a user's point of view - and that is different.

Ah, but it's dkhiggin's livelihood to extend awareness to encompass other users' points of view. I do that work professionally too, just not all the time these days.

In this user's world, 'your' definitely preferred to 'my'. It's just more grownup.

v

In case I wasn't clear in 319, I heartily agree that the site should address me as "you" in all cases. The site is not me. If it starts referring to "my books" I'll tell it that I want them back, they're mine.

So true! I only mentioned it so you would know that I know a little whereof I speak! I'm sure it came across as pompous...

No, no. I should have put a smiley-face or something. My tone was humorous. And if you know what you're talking about, well, I'm not claiming that. LT has a lot of UI problems.

I think there's a deep, deep issue about designing UIs in a group. I feel that a group will never give you the iPod, especially if you started out with something much more feature-rich. Someone is going to be dead-set against losing the X button. But the iPod is a great result. I'm not sure how to resolve that issue.

My vs. your

I think it's a cultural thing. I think My is more common, but some LTers thinks it's cloying--it's the nurse asking "How are we today?" I'm not sure it makes much of a difference in comprehension, but I suspect it's "distancing" to some users more accustomed to UI-familiarity.

I think My is more common, but some LTers thinks it's cloying--it's the nurse asking "How are we today?"

That is exactly how I feel about it. LT is a site that I interact with. LT is not "me".

>350 SylviaC:

Can LT call you Sylvie-wilvie-sweety-weety?

Notice: I do call my son Sweety-weety, sweetzy-weetzy, buddy-wuddy, nubly-bubbly and lamby-toes. I have been outed.

351: Toddler names don't count. :)

it's the nurse asking "How are we today?"

Or the security system saying in your own pre-recorded voice, "I have to enter the password now."

It's much less strange to just talk to yourself.

>351 timspalding:

Only if you can provide barf-bags with the LT logo on them.

>354 SylviaC:

They're coming. Once we have a corporate jet.

Long thread, don't know if I voted further up, but definitely, My Whatever. Your is disconcerting. I am not a your, I am a me, and they are my books.

You find "Your books" to be "disconcerting"? Ditto your profile, edit your profile, etc.?

#357, Tim, no the rest don't bother me. They really aren't mine, they also don't really exist. The books are real, physical and mine.

No it doesn't really bother me. But frankly I don't understand why it says "your" or "my" at all - why not just "books"? (though I liked "library" better)

If so, make it "add" instead of "add books".

>360 Nicole_VanK: If so, make it "add" instead of "add books".

Then we won't know if we're supposed to add books or bobcats.

If it just said "Library," we'd have another zillion posts asking how one checks out the books.

If it just said "Library," we'd have another zillion posts asking how one checks out the books.

Almost every day someone writes me to ask how they download the books now.

Almost every day someone writes me to ask how they download the books now. (#363)

Yes, those do seem to be getting more frequent in Talk, too.

but there is a big ADD BOOKS right on top!

Download, not upload. They think LibraryThing has books (presumably ebooks) available to read - don't realize it's a cataloging site. How they manage that...

Okay, so how about if it says "username's books". I've been on a bunch of websites that say "Helcura's whatever." Of course it would take up a fair amount of real estate for people with long user names . . .

I have to admit a preference for the single word tabs. After all, we have Home (not Your Home or My Home), Profile (again ...). My preferences would be (in order):

Catalog(ue)
Library
Books
List
Data (I'm trying to be thorough)

The single word tabs just look so much ... cleaner. I'd also prefer Add to Add Books.

I believe that "Library" will be ambiguous to a lot of people, particularly since we have elsewhere in the site (LT Local) links to real libraries.

I think books is the best, It avoids the catalog/catalogue debate. And library sounds so vague. And catalogue could be anything - a catalogue of records, of DVDs, etcetera. So can library -at least on a computer. your "media library" or "music library" is commonly used. But "books" is clear. It also presumably discourages people from adding non-book things to LT. (at least more than library or catalogue where people might assume they can enter anything)

They think LibraryThing has books (presumably ebooks) available to read - don't realize it's a cataloging site. How they manage that...

If they came to LT via a search rather than through the homepage, how would they know what it is?

371> Read the un-signed-in home page?

OK, I'm being slightly snide. I suppose some of the stuff on there ('find new books to read' 'import from anywhere', maybe 'join the world's largest bookclub') could be taken to mean there are ebooks here. But it does start out with the description 'an easy, library-quality catalog.' And they have to have gone to that page to get an account in order to post.

I could see people thinking there were ebooks as well as a catalog, but I've answered several posts recently where they clearly thought this was another Project Gutenberg - "I see all these books, how do I download them?" sort of stuff. It's the 'don't realize it's a cataloging site' that I was wondering how people managed.

Of course, I came to LT from a search for book-cataloging software (and was very dubious about doing it all online rather than on my own computer). LT has always been primarily a catalog in my mind. Which probably colors how I see others who apparently don't see that aspect.

ETA clarity

> 372

A lot of people these days don't know what a 'catalog' is. I know! It's sad! But... unfortunately true.

I get a number of reference questions that are things like 'Can you see if the library has this book, I don't know how' or 'My professor said this is in the library catalog - what's that?'

It's just too long! Continued here.

I don't think there should be any confusion if someone quickly reads about a book and doesn't see whatever would denote a DVD. DVDs are of movies and the movie is always different than the book.
I have bought the books to 10 of my most favorite movies and the movies to 5 of my favorite-most books. Either the movie is better than the book or vv, always depending on which I saw first. I read "The Nanny Diaries" before it came to DVD and the movie was not as I'd pictured it. It had some nice parts (opening "anthropolgy" of Manhattanites) not in book and VV. Rare were both great in their own writes ("I Am David' would probably never had many reccomendations as a good book, but the movie was good. ) Exception was "A High Wind In Jamaica" a top 100 books of the century by the ALA a decade ago, which had very innovative writing, a man inside a little girl's head, and a movie with a totally different viewpoint character (the audience-- Emily was even inscrutable rather than the viewpoint) but she was a lovely child, the actress, and played an entire perception into the movie not seen in the book, the love of a grown man for a little girl. A taboo love and for the pirate, the only real love he's ever known. The theme song played to this, the way the pirate, talking, would catch the girl out of the corner of his eye and react. I finally understood why he let himelf be hanged. It was never said, in either medium, but you knew how different she was and loved her too. And this was a decidedly different Emily than the one whose story was delived through Emily's brain by a narrator, making you love her nutty mind, not shown in the movie. This is the only time, maybe also "Gone With the Wind", when both had their values. For me. "National Velvet" the movie gave no indication how well the book was written. They aren't compatable, generally.
I have been seeing book reviews in my small-town paper that could be for the movie, too-they only telll the story briefly, that the author was manic depressive as were all 8 members of his family, but his parents used going overboard with religion to deal, he used drugs, finally called his depressed dad when he hit bottom, and was set on a new path to redemption. End of review. I screamed, tell us about the crafting, the writing, the voice, what makes it stand out from the batches of memoirs marching out. He could easily have been going on about the movie. (Were there one.) I want to know w/o knowing what some tiny symbol means or reading every word that this is a movie review, not a book. If there is a book called Goya's Ghosts, I haven't seen it yet, but I did see the last 10 minues of the movie, and, knowing nothing of the storyline or characters except the role hero Xavier Baldem has in "No Country for Old Men," was amazed at his heroic take, definitely not a character actor. But the reason I cried for 10 minutes after was, as I watched the crowd grab him, drag him, and a young-looking girl in it yell his name unsuccessfully a few times, then saw him finally look up and see her right before they broke his neck, she wasn't letting him see, his last view of life with all the hatred and meanness of the Catholic Church and the crowds, her also fighting helplessly to stop his death, screaming,"NO!" so he could also die knowing it was tearing her up. She gave him a boroad smile he probably had once loved her for seeing on her, and held up a baby. He smiled back, and died. What got me was not just her attitude, her magic--she was the only person who could have made him happy at his last moment alive, by showing him the happy face he'd liked to see--but her extreme youth, ethereal beuaty and deep, peasant-like voice. There is no way the book could give me this character to love--the actres was perfect. I guess you could say, I fall for characters. Both book ones--which, then, I would never accept the actors cast as them, having my own views of them--and movie ones. (I knew Elphaba of "Wicked" intimately and was not about to see a play with someone not her, called her.)
I say that calling it 'books' here ensures the majority leave out DVDs, which are different from the books. But I think Librarything has a winner with the word library & shouldn't have to say "books" to keep movies out--there should be a clear rule doing so. It may be too hard to check everything but Readers could flag movie versions and so could ISBN numbers.

Now it's really too long! Continued here.

I'd just like to reiterate my request that the tags on the home page be listed alphebetically by COLUMN. It's not intuitive to scan ROWS alphabetically, and the columns have those dividing gray lines, which reinforces the eye's desire to scan vertically. Since they're alphabetized vertically on the tag page, it seems natural to expect the same style on the home page, too.