List your top 5 improvements!

There were objections to the previous thread about small improvements. Here, anything goes.

Since I overlooked the "small" in the other threads, I include what I put over there . . here.

1) A better, or really any method of incorporating works within works (ie, works in an Anthology, Omnibus editions, etc.)

I include here the example I gave in another thread.
from another thread:
"I've heard this before, the "inclusions" and "Contained in", and I've been curious since I heard of that concept to see what it might look like.

While there probably is something in the works that is different, I did run across a neat way of having short stories/books/etc. contained within a work. I found it over on a comics database - each individual work, comic, is individually included in the system, and the book that contains the other work is also included in the system. Within the omnibus/anthology book there are links to the other work. And each shorter work has a links to everything it is contained within.

For example:
Angel: After The Fall (2007) - TPB vol. 01 contains within it, or collects 5 comics. And the individual comic, for example Angel: After The Fall (2007) - #1 notes where it is located (ie, Comic one is "Reprinted/Collected in:
Angel: After The Fall (2007) HC vol. 01
Angel: After The Fall (2007) TPB vol. 01")

Also visible if you look at Comic 1 are variations, different editions. All linked together.
as in:
"There are other versions of this issue in the database:
Angel: After The Fall (2007) Cover B
Angel: After The Fall (2007) Directors Cut
etc." But that is a different subject matter."

2) A better method of handling works written by more than one person.

3) Tied to one - a better method of seeing separate editions of a work without having to "blow it up". At the moment it seems you can only see more than one edition by separating out the edition (well, you can see a line to separate but that does not include all the information a separate entry for an edition might contain - see the part . . well I copy here:
"There are other versions of this issue in the database:
Angel: After The Fall (2007) Cover B
Angel: After The Fall (2007) Directors Cut
etc." But that is a different subject matter." The variations are separate links.

4) Somewhat similar/different from 3. If three implemented four would be taken care of. A better method of applying/accessing/delivering information of a work, the same work with itself (ie, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" (UK) = "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" (USA) = "Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal" = "Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen" etc.)

5) A quicker/better way of seeing a list of your own posts so you can quickly find what it is you are looking for to . . um . . put . . in 1. (hmm. I could favorite all my own posts . . if I can favorite my own posts)

(note: I leapt over here to add my top 5 when reading this thread but overlooked the "small" part)

My list hasn't changed much:

1. A field for page number in the catalog.

2. Dewey Decimal search, if the OCLC allows that kind of thing.

3. Posting various infos to Twitter, other than the existing review feature.

4. Lists.

5. An expanded mobile site.

Contents (anthologies, omnibus, etc)
Editions / Readd a manual copy
Lists
Multi-author works
Amazon and OCLC making sense

(FYI, I had no objections to the previous thread. Just being snarky about some that weren't small improvements.)

1. Fix touchstones so the functionality that is supposed to be there works 100% correctly all the time. This includes when you select a touchstone choice other than the default that it saves that touchstone when you edit/save the post.

2. Improve touchstones. This would include the ability to touchstone series. An improved interface for picking the touchstones would be useful. It could also support alternate text, like [[Robert Heinlein|Heinlein]] showing the text "Heinlein" but touchstoning the author Robert Heinlein. Not a big deal but sometimes nice. Also, better styling of touchstones so they are distinguishable from regular links.

3. Re-vamp of the Talk posting system. This would include preview and the ability to correctly edit/save posts without having it do a one-way munge on your special characters (like how I used html entities above to get the square brackets - if I hit edit on this post, they would be changed to actual square brackets in my edit text instead of the original entities). Also add a <verbatim> tag to wrap around stuff that you don't want the posting system to try to auto-format.

4. Re-vamp of the Your books catalog, including special attention paid to printing out. This would hopefully fix a lot of the layout issues that crop up here. Add the ability to save the sort fields along with the view style.

5. Inclusions inclusions inclusions.

>5 brightcopy: Yeah, but Tim said the focus on small improvements made the whole thing worthless.

Recognizing that many or most of these are massive undertakings on the same order of magnitude as Collections:

1. Inclusions. (Aka Contains/Contained in, a way of handling omnibus volumes and short stories, connecting them to where they are contained and vice versa.) I could stop getting recommendations for omnibus volumes where I own the constituents and be properly connected to people who hold the same content in different forms, and I could find out what short stories I have where.

2. Inclusions.

3. Inclusions.

4. Inclusions.

5. Inclusions.

More seriously, if less emphatically:

1. Inclusions.

2. Real author disambiguation.

3. Separating more than one edition from a work at a time (via checkboxes or the like.) While I'm asking for a pony, the ability to simultaneously combine all of the separated bits, so that if there is a case like

Book A
Book A
Book B
Book A
Book B

I could select all of the Book B and in a single action have them be separated from Book A, leaving

Book A
Book A
Book A

Book B
Book B

In cases with dozens of intermingled editions this would be a magic bullet. Currently if there are N editions of a book miscombined with another, it takes at least N+1 actions to separate them, while it only took the infernal idiot 1 to combine them; cutting this back to 1 or 2 actions to undo the damage would make combiners' lives so much easier.

4. Searchable Dewey and LC fields.

5. Hide all the perfumes and stuffed bobcats and similar crap from searches -- people can still catalog them if they feel the need, but nobody else has to see their trash unless they're deliberately seeking it out.

1) Finish the "Other Authors" work.
2) Finish the photos work (for venues)
3) Better mobile site (detect iPhone or Android browsers and work accordingly, use HTML5 offline storage)
4) Implement Tim's recent proposals from the "Update the Series Cloud" thread
5) Fix bugs
Not necessarily in that order

1. Make Touchstones work

2. Editions so that you can have Publisher's series and so that you can see all of the '#editions' when they are all combined.

3. A way to say that X is part of/included in Y (for short stories and Omnibus editions)

4. fix authors: so that they are really separated, and can be easily fixed when the wrong spelling or author ends up being entered. A way to deal with multiple authors in a book.

5. Work on the bugs, don't ignore them even if they are small. (Bug day ?), and finish all the stuff that gets started and then abandoned, and update data more regularly (servers permitting).

- Finish other authors: make it work on older records and give other authors their own page.
- Fix author system so every author can have their own page (and therefore their own CK).
- Contains/Contained in relationship and fix the recommendation system to use it.
- An edition level so we can stop removing publisher series that don't meet the criteria.
- Lists

said the focus on small improvements made the whole thing worthless

Zoe said the moon was made of Swiss cheese.

Incidentally, the title of the thread was "top 5 SMALL improvements." I don't consider that a reliable guide to what people want. - Tim

I await your citation of my statement about the moon and cheese.

1) Add the author page disambiguation notice to the top of the author splitting / work assignment page.

That's it for now.

It doesn't make it worthless, it makes it about small improvements. You said in that thread that it was about what people "want." I dispute that. I think the fact that the #1 request was for purple checkmarks for wishlists pretty much demonstrates people were thinking about small, seemingly doable things.

I think these threads are worthwhile. The other one was too. Member feedback has its limits however. They are:

1. Bias toward people who use talk. That means people who've largely been there and done that on the site, especially as regards cataloging, not people starting out.
2. Bias toward people already here, not people who could be here.
3. Users rarely suggest leaps. LibraryThing would be nowhere if we hadn't added Talk and groups, for example, but they came relatively late and were opposed by many of the current set--whose expectations of the site didn't include a social element.
4. Weird distortions caused by perceptions of what's easy and hard—which are often wrong—and by what other people are suggesting—which cuts in various ways.

I think the fact that the #1 request was for purple checkmarks for wishlists pretty much demonstrates people were thinking about small, seemingly doable things.

No, it just shows that you were way off in thinking that separation of wishlists was intrinsically a ridiculous concept. Purple checkmarks came up in discussion all the time. People really wanted them, and not just because they seemed minor.

I know member feedback has its limits, but I don't think those limits are quite as severe as you make out.

Bias toward people who use talk. That means people who've largely been there and done that on the site, especially as regards cataloging, not people starting out.

There are frequently discussions, even among regular users, about how to make the site more welcoming/accessible for those just starting out. I don't even think OverCat is a new-user feature; people starting out tend to use the default (Amazon), and only later--sometimes--decide they'd prefer library sources.

I also don't think it's intrinsically a problem to cater to the regular users. On other sites that I follow less regularly, I don't pay as much attention to the new feature discussions, because it doesn't matter as much to me. And I don't think it's strange that my opinion there doesn't have as much weight as the opinions of people who really care. Satisfying the people who use the site most, and are most likely to talk about it to their friends, support it financially, etc., seems like a reasonable idea to me.

Bias toward people already here, not people who could be here.

Hey, I said that I wanted to use FB to advertise LT to my friends, and you reacted like that was the worst idea ever.

Users rarely suggest leaps. LibraryThing would be nowhere if we hadn't added Talk and groups, for example, but they came relatively late and were opposed by many of the current set--whose expectations of the site didn't include a social element.

There comes a point when you have a strong foundation and can get more value for time spent by making incremental improvements to the features you already have. At the very least, you shouldn't focus on leaps to the complete exclusion of smaller improvements. We really should have had the ability to set our have-read markers two years earlier, for example.

Posting pre-emptively due to low battery.

Weird distortions caused by perceptions of what's easy and hard—which are often wrong—and by what other people are suggesting—which cuts in various ways.

I don't think the distortions are actually a problem; if someone is confused into *thinking* that Feature A is in their Top 5 list when it really shouldn't have been, I think they'll still be happy to see it developed.

As for distorted perceptions, you could easily address that by responding to more RSI threads, explaining whether a suggestion is difficult/easy and likely to be implemented or not.

I accept that it is difficult for anyone, even a computer programmer, to judge what is a small change without being familiar with the code. Also that the site has improved considerably since I thought it worth $25 to join, and that there is a need to constantly get new people in as my money has been spent.

However I do find it annoying that I have be reading "We recently added a more robust system for other authors, including separate standing for each author and a role (eg., Editor, Illustrator).This feature is currently available for newly-added books only, but it will be extended to all books soon." for two and a half years. Not my definition of soon. (though this is presumably not a small change). I have over 250 books where I have other author information to add, and have been waiting.

Also "Author name is composed of at least n distinct authors (edit assignments). LibraryThing has only recently introduced this feature. In the near future distinct authors will have their own pages." is a case where we have been waiting for the "near future" for at least 15 months.

Some indication of how much longer we have to wait would be nice.

17: Or just removing the recently/currently/soon/near, after, oh, a year?

... and back to the topic.

off the top of my head & without looking at my old lists to create consistency, i'll say my top 5 in no particular order are:

- (1) lists
- (2) fun games / quote recognition / trivia / etc. as modules for front page.
- (3) record replacement
- (4) relationship-handling: contained-in, contains, TOC, etc.
- (5) full author disambiguation etc.
- (6) COVER enhancements: for any cover be able to link to artist, designer, publisher / edition information, etc. at least to artist / designer ... please?
- (7) ability to mark books as PRIVATE ... please? i really really want to be able to put all my smut into my main account. (-;
- (8) more support & use of "original publication date" ... and a truncated form of the fieldname for the catalog heading.
- (9) scope notes for tags. really, i just want to be able to add notes to my tags, and then on a tag page, couldn't we see other people's notes? wouldn't that be fun? but then people should be able to mark their notes as "public" or "anonymous" or "private"
- (10) journaling ... some way to tie reviews into "reading date" system and also into some other cool feature.
- (11) GROUPS: a group list of "groups you've started"
- (12) "recently read" and "currently reading" -- more social functionality around that.
- (13) a way to track "when / where you found out about / got this book" with social info tying it to a) LT chat groups, b) LT users, c) bookstores/Local locations ... maybe bookcrossing or whatever.

hey, so it's not 5. be glad it's not the counting system my 2yo employs, which includes "eleventeen".

17> I don't understand your first point. Isn't it equally possible to do the separate author thing on already-added books by editing the book, just like it is with adding new books via manual entry? What am I missing here?

20> Before Other Author Roles were added books had an Other Author field where the other authors were entered in first name last name order separated by commas. After the new feature was added the old books still have the old Other Author field and the new books have the nifty new fields. The only way to get the new fields on an old book is to delete the book and re-add it. There were a few attempts to convert the old records to the new format but there was some technical problem and Tim seems to have given up on it.

My choices for improvements:

1. Make Touchstones work better (instead of Boolean "or" type search, have an option like most libraries where authors can be searched by the sequence of letters of last name, first name; similarly, works).

2. Have a better way of handling author disambiguation, so that useful CK can be entered in for each individual.

3. Story and essay listing for anthologies with searchable authors.

4. Make finding tag combination page easier (maybe this already exists -- but I first search for a tag, go to the tag, find the 'guidelines' link on the lower right of the page, and then get to the tag combo page form the link on the guidelines page).

5. Extend the greater "Other Authors" records to books catalogued more than 2 (?) years ago, and then be able to search for these "other" people, and look at a list of them as one can do for CK.

>21 jjwilson61:

The basic thing here is that we need a system for upgrading records. The basic thing that involves is:

1. A way for it to compare records and spot differences.
2. A system for reviewing and accepting or rejecting changes.

This is very much part of the OverCat plan. I'm glad I didn't make a special system for just authors, because it wouldn't be at all reusable, and would have probably just flipped over again when we got good data and a real system.

1) Get manually entered books and corrected records into Overcat.

2) Touchstone improvement. Including to make edits stick, and to have exact title beat most popular that could maybe be related.

3) Better exports- A complete export of all black material with option to include green. Exports by collection or tag.

4) Printing options - Currently printing out catalogue searches does not work reliably.

5) A field for location of book.

1. Contained In/Contains
2. Other Authors (if OverCat will help with that, yay!)
3. Complete export - add collections, in particular, to TD export (or CSV, if that becomes complete). Covers would also be nice - there are other things, too, like multiple reading dates.
4. A way to tell which of the covers on the Change Cover page is currently applied to my book. Highlight the applied cover (Amazon or member-uploaded)? Also a way to see the cover full size.
5. Author disambiguation

Large, small (I think), some in progress or at least high on the list. No leaps (at least, none that Tim didn't propose to start with) here, but I'd love any or all of these...

These strike me as large projects which would add value to the site
1. Works within Works
2. Author Disambiguation
3. Author Roles
4. BookMooch Wishlist Integration
5. Universal Search Box

1) Fix all the started features that have become abandoned. Author roles, tagwatch, currently reading etc and et al,

2) Bug fixes. A weekly sweep minimum. With feedback.

3) touchstones see above. Author touchstones are a disgrace. Include tripple brackets for series markers

4) A reliable ebook data source - for non-kindle and I guess kindle formats. THis may well invovle using members' data

5) inclusions as above

6) seperating statistics and connections for wishlist vs other collections. If I have a book wishlisted, in the official wishlist collection I do NOT share this book with someone who has read it. I might be interested in other people who have it wishlisted.

7) currently reading/recently read connections. Who is reading the same book I am now.

8) Use ratings.

RTA 9) - "Add to wishlist" to add the author's name to the title by default. Makes searches SO much better.

Lots of people are mentioning works within works. I agree but if done it should be done properly and not in an half-arsed way. That is the contained works (and I am thinking short stories in collections and anthologies here) should be able to be reviewed, ranked, CK'd, rated and have all the stuff done on them that normal works should have.

Author Page improvements - in addition to the improvements that people have already mentioned (disambiguation, multiple authors, non-primary authors getting author pages etc.) I think this will need to be improved because of the first suggestion. Some authors list of works will explode to unmanageable levels. Therefore a flag to group works, so that one can just see physical volumes that one might have bought. The full list including short stories would be a click away. That may be extended to break up into sections depending on role. So Mervyn Peake would have a section of books he wrote (those are generally credited to him using the primary role), and a section showing books he illustrated (where he appears in the other roles as Illustrator).

Lists. Great. I think this will bring a fair bit to the social side (if lists can be given adequate visibility) and also reduce some of the pressures and misuses (IMO) of CK.

Better export.

I am sure I will think of more as soon as I've hit submit.

Some of these are mentioned above, and I believe are being worked on (thanks, Tim), but I'm listing then anyway to show support!

1. Other Authors for older works in new format. I would be happy (well, maybe willing but not happy) to re-enter them myself; I just would like to be able to do it.

2. Ability to switch books in my library that were entered from Amazon (before I knew better) and then heavily edited to data from other sources without changing the date of entry, etc. For my own probably peculiar reasons, it's meaningful to me to see when I entered a book for the first time.

3. Touchstones that work and that stick.

A lot of the other ideas sound good too, but these are the ones that would be useful for me. I also realize that the first two are definitely oriented towards current users (i.e., me), not attracting new ones, but they just seem so compelling . . .

An increase in computing/processing power so that features that use loads of that stuff don't have to be turned off.

I'm not sure I actually have 5 right now (I know, what?!?) - there are lots of things I think would be great, but the things that I currently find actively frustrating about the site and really would like to see changed are:

1) A universal search box (preferably with options for searching works, authors, series, or tags) on every page please, please, please. I've gotten to the point where I just google it because it takes so dang long for LT to get there. Maybe we can finally get the search improvements we've been hearing about for awhile in there too! I'd like to not see 20 results for an author when they've all already been combined, there is no visible difference, and I have no idea which is the one to click on...

2) Touchstones that work and that stay when you edit.

3) Site speed. I know Tim is pushing this and working on it and there's a lot of complicated stuff behind the scenes, but I often find bits of the site - in particular work pages, editing work pages, and pulling up search results to be intensely slow.

I should probably add my own list, but I think it will vary depending on my mood:

1) Lists. I think this could be perceived as a leap--maybe not a big leap, but it would provide a whole new way of browsing for books. It would be nice to go to a group and see, say, the 75 Book Challenge Top Books of 2009, created by allowing each member to enter five or ten books (maybe ranked) and adding up the results. Coupled with a default Read collection, users could also see what percentage of a list they'd read.

2) Fields for where I heard about this book, who recommended it (for LT usernames), where I bought it/borrowed it (connected to Local venues), etc. I think this is also a leap, and one whose potential Tim hasn't yet understood (he thinks it would be boring). Beyond personal cataloguing data, which is a good thing as well, this would be another new way of browsing the site. If I were looking at User A's profile and profile subpages, I could see that she had read a lot of interesting books on the recommendation of User B, or that she was getting good recommendations from Group X, and I could then follow through to User B or Group X, and on from there to other pages, and so on.

3. More power to the date fields! There's so much potential here. One of the most-desired date improvements is a fully functional reading timeline.

4. Weekly bug-fixing time. It's gotten to the point where I usually don't bother reporting bugs, because chances are the report will be ignored and I'm just wasting my time.

5. Spend a bit of extra time to polish up new features rather than abandoning them right away. It would be great if Local could sort bookstores by number of people who have favourited them, for example.

I see wishlist checkmarks! w00t!

27> 6) seperating statistics and connections for wishlist vs other collections. If I have a book wishlisted, in the official wishlist collection I do NOT share this book with someone who has read it. I might be interested in other people who have it wishlisted.

You can already do this by unchecking the Use For Connections box on the Edit Collections page. Or do you mean not using connections to other people's wishlists?

34: Yes, but Zoe wants statistics and wishlist vs wishlist, not wishlist vs my library.

That wasn't actually me :). I've concluded that LT wishlists are a lost cause.

36: Oops! Wrong person complaining about wishlists. :)

I'd like a running log of additions/changes I've made to my library, including books deleted. Nothing fancy, just something I could scroll through if a question arises.

My list, in descending order of importance. Once I got started, I couldn't stop at 5.

#1 Private works or other slightly more granular privacy for the catalog (not too granular - just the ability to have some books or collections, like wishlist, that are private while keeping the rest of library public)

#2 Contained-in/Contains (some way generally of linking a work to an anthology, to show that I have the work, if not as a single book - also perhaps could include a way of linking abridged to complete works)

#3 More leveraging of collections: more granularity of settings, so that you can set which collections are used for or excluded from recent activity, members with your books, etc.

#4 Fully separating same-name authors

#5 Lists

#6 Better "plus sign" adding from work page and catalog, using an edition or ISBN-specific interface perhaps something like you have for the "get this book" lightbox

#7 Development of "other authors" - both extension of other author roles to older books, and more done with secondary authors, so that they're also linked somehow from works, and so that those books are linked to their author page

#8 An "organize your books" page, that allows you to manage your collections and your tags without having the use the light-box pop-up for collections. Could be just a small revamp of current tag page.

Other:
#9 fix the d**n "fiend friends" feature already. Not really because I use it, but because it bugs me that it's been broken for more than a year, maybe 2, without any bug message or anything indicating that it's broken.

#10 Color scheme changes/some limited site redesign to make it cleaner and less wedding-minty

I'm usually more of a lurker, but I do have a few things I would like to see, in no particular order:

1) A field for location of the book. I currently use the Bookcrossing ID field and my own shorthand for location.

2) A way to display the "Number of copies" field, as seen on the Edit book page, in the Your Books grid. Once entered, there is currently no way to ever find books you marked as more than 1. I have mentioned this before, and most people immediately confuse it with work duplicates, but that is not what I am talking about.

3) This is probably dreaming, but I would like a way to do Next and Previous. For instance, if I search on an author or tag in the Your Books grid, and say 11 books are displayed, then select the first book to see its Main Page, I would like to be able to go to the Next book in the list without using the browser back button and then physically selecting the next book, and so on and so on.

4) I would like a way to find the books I requested in the Early Reviewers program after the list has been closed. This is so I can add the books I didn't receive to my BookMooch wishlist. Now, I would have to read all the book descriptions again to see if a particular book interested me, and don't usually have that much time!

5) A way to fix misspelled or non-Title-case titles and author names and have them be permanent or default, not just for your own library.

6) An actual field for number of pages in a book.

7) Ability to apply cascading style sheets to the site to customize it for each user. Several themes could be created, or individual settings could control the color, the font face, the font size, etc, in additon to the current choices available in the "customize this page" functionality.

40 - good suggestions; I especially like #3.

5) A way to fix misspelled or non-Title-case titles and author names and have them be permanent or default, not just for your own library.
This can be done with Canonical Titles and Canonical Names (after combining incorrectly spelled works or authors with the correct ones, if needed). It's not possible to change other people's data (and I wouldn't want someone to be able to change my capitalization, etc., but it is possible to change how titles and names shows up on the site-wide work and author pages, through those CK fields.

But be careful how you use Canonical Name for authors - there's currently a bug where if a CN is ever entered, it cannot then be deleted; or rather, if it's deleted, the author name becomes blank (instead of drawing from the names on the books in that work, as it does if no CN is entered). If there's even a tiny question about the name (how it's spelled, which variant/alias should be canonical, language, accents) don't enter a CN.

>42 jjmcgaffey:

Are you sure that's true. I believe that deleting the name restores it now.

Ah, OK. I hadn't seen an announcement of a fix, and it's not something I do so I hadn't tried it myself. yay if it is fixed!

It's currently a problem for http://www.librarything.com/author/melvillehenrydundasv

and to test, I just removed the Canonical Name from http://www.librarything.com/author/wellingtonarthurwell and his name went blank.

Removing Canonical Title is ok on works, but removing Canonical Name is still a problem for authors.

It would be cool if removing a Canonical Name would force recalculation of the preferred name. Then we wouldn't need a button to do it manually.

Ah. I see. I was confusing it with works.

I'll take a look. I'd almost rather not deal, as the name-recalculation is so painful.

45/46: I'll take displaying the name in the URL or the last name used, if recalculating is too much load.

1. More Privacy Options: Private books, private collections, ability to give permission to specific friends to see my whole catalog. I think ability to fine tune privacy options is a huge deal. Some kind of middle ground between let everybody see everything, and don't let anybody see anything which is the only real choice now. This is almost as important to me as collections used to be. That was my number one for a long time.

2. Finishing Incomplete Features

3. Bug Fixes

Granted 2 & 3 aren't as exciting as shiny new features, but I think it's important to not lose sight of them.

I don't really have a 4 & 5. I'm still excited over getting collections!

#48 I only have one word to say about the dangers of offering variable privacy - facebook. If you get one tiny part of it wrong, people are going to hate you unto the seventh generation.

I agree with your 2 and 3 though.

Oh, and you really do seem to be "excited over getting collections", your profile still says:-

Most of these books are wishlist type books which will be more clear whenever the collections feature comes out.

;)

My hopes (and dreams) for LT in no particular order:

1. A way of pulling the work graphic of currently reading onto my profile page

2. A way to list % of book read (this would be particularly nice to go along with the work graphic I'd be able to pull onto my profile page!)

3. Ability to pull up work and see which members have that book on their wishlists

4. Involvement, on a rotating basis, with charitable organizations, particularly those that need donations of gently used books

5. Lists (ETA: the ability for members to create lists of related books - e.g. "beach reads", "my all-time top ten favorite novels", "book you don't want to miss", etc.)

6. More (more frequent or any) options for real life involvement among LT members on a local level

7. Marketing tools that I can use at book festivals to share my excitement about LT (e.g. down loadable fliers, bookmarks, etc.)

8. Making touchstones stick

P.S. I thought you said "List your top 8 improvements!" ;)

I especially like #1, SqueakyChu.

But I confess to not having a clear idea of exactly what you folks mean when you say 'lists'.

> 51

I edited message #50 to clarify what I mean when I say "Lists".

>49 justjim: I actually don't know anyone who hates FB because of their failures with variable privacy. Deliberate disregard for privacy is something completely different.

>51 majkia: For Lists, I'm personally most interested in ones generated from contributions by multiple members. So everyone could list their top ten favourite novels, and a composite list would be create by adding up all the votes.

In order:

1. Other authors for my earlier-posted books. I don't care if it translates things automatically from the old field. Actually, for most of my books it won't be able to, because I never bothered with it for most of the data. I just want to be able to enter the information that I can for my newer books. A button/link to let me do it manually would be wonderful. And, hey, then you could change your footnote to say "* We recently added a more robust system for other authors, including separate standing for each author and a role (eg., Editor, Illustrator). You can update your book manually, or you can wait and your data will be automatically changed over to the new system Real Soon Now." ;-)

2. The contains/contained-by thing.

3. Tag watch. I miss it.

4. Speaking of missing things, I'd like the list of 'Currently Reading' users back on the book page too. 'Recently Read' would be nice too, for those who use the date fields.

5. Specifying a check color for a collection. The only reason I don't include my audio books in 'Your library' is because I want the ones I only have an audio version of to look different in the lists. Of course, this implies that I want a way to tell LT the order in which to apply the colors.

> 53

I'm personally most interested in ones generated from contributions by multiple members. So everyone could list their top ten favourite novels, and a composite list would be create by adding up all the votes.

That's actually what I had in mind. I didn't express it well. The lists should be composites within categories. Otherwise, they become too much like lists on Amazon.

55: But I like the lists on Amazon...

I think that there's room for both kinds of lists, but that the composite lists are what will make the feature really exciting. There are various easy ways for people to create personal lists already: via collections, or in threads, or on the wiki....

Yeah, but you can't go to a work page and see "oh, there's a list about foo theme in this book".

And without that, people will keep using Series.

That's true. So I'll stick with my position that we should have both.

I'm still more excited about composite lists, though ;)

59: Yes, both sound fun. Particularly since the multiple members of composite lists meant they can't be "abandoned". For composite lists, I would like to be able to see what a single individual selected as well as the group totals.

49> Thanks, I fixed it. :)

#43 "6) seperating statistics and connections for wishlist vs other collections. If I have a book wishlisted, in the official wishlist collection I do NOT share this book with someone who has read it. I might be interested in other people who have it wishlisted.

You can already do this by unchecking the Use For Connections box on the Edit Collections page. Or do you mean not using connections to other people's wishlists?"

Not in their library or profile though. I visit someone's page and am told I share 100 books. Of which between my wishlist and theirs, we may not have read a single book in common.

#59

BGG which you talk about a fair bit allows composite lists or lists where only the owner may add titles.

Personally I would like 'addition to lists' to be restricted to one of three classes chosen by the creator.
a) Completely open to any user
b) Open to the creator
c) Open to the creator AND members of a specified group.

For me visibility is the key. Having it on a work page is good but not enough. If you see it as a key feature it has to be visible at much higher level. I would support ordering by most recently created and by activity (most recently added to) date. The lists should be searchable by creator, and by words in the list title (and maybe a free-text search within the description).

Items on the list should be orderable by the creator. If the lists display the book cover (and I would support that as an optional view-style) the person who adds an item should be able to choose which cover for a work is displayed.

1) An option for collections that keeps works within that collection from showing up on the Reviews page. I don't want to see reviews for books I've wishlisted unless I'm visiting the work page explicitly for the reviews, and I want to be able to block a work from being on that page if there's a rash of reviews for it but I don't particularly care to read them (it felt that half the page was reviews for The Great Gatsby yesterday, though it may have only been three or four).

Being able to toggle which works are pulled for reviews by selecting a collection would be another option, if having a tickbox for "do not include on the Reviews page" doesn't seem right. Dunno which would be easier or better (I prefer the tickbox...). This is something that has bothered me since collections came out.

2) Site search box on the homepage, at the very least. Even with search broken like it is now, that's better than nothing, though a search box on the top of the page above the Search | Zeitgeist | More tabs would be ideal.

3) Generic editions, and an easy way to add them.

This is part of the contains/contained in and related works items on other wishlists. But a way to have all the editions of a particular book (say, a textbook) on one page, but not have them combined as duplicate works. So Pop-Up Alice and Annotated Alice and Alice in Wonderland are the same as the generic Alice, but they aren't the same thing. Only this is super complicated, I know. So for now, I just want an easy way to add a generic edition of a book (Title/Author) without having to use the manual add form. Maybe a truncated manual add?

4) This might be something for someone to create outside of LT, maybe not, but an app for my desktop that would be like virtual Manual Add notecards, that I can save and fill in the details offline, then have the data entered into my catalogue when I'm satisfied with it. I could have multiple "notecards" open at any one time, and I could close the window without losing the data. It's a bit like the import thing, but it bypasses the Add Books search to automatically do a Manual Addition with the data filled in.

I tend to keep a Manual Add tab open on my Firefox all the time, and it's a pain to keep having to track back to it, or worry about losing any information I'm working on. I use it for books that I only want a Title/Author and maybe reading date for, but lately I'm also dissatisfied with what I get from library sources and I don't want to use Amazon, so I'm using it for all the books I add.

5) Cover choices to stick on the Recently Added modules even if the book is edited after a cover is chosen.

64> 1) Perhaps the reviews could be pulled from your Your Library collection.

This has been a pet peeve of mine since Tim added the Your Library collection. If it is really supposed to represent the books that you consider part of your library, whatever that means to you, then it ought to have more of an effect on the other features of the site. For example the list of books you share with others ought to only include those books that both you and the other member have included in the Your Library collection.

>65 jjwilson61: Agreed.

65> It's a bit squidgy, I think. I consider My Library to be books that I own, but not all the books that I have on my shelves are in My Library, and I also feel that I have a connection to books that are Read But Unowned - maybe a book in the RBU collection got loaned out and never returned or I lost it somewhere or it's simply not a book that is mine to do with as I please. My collections are really fuzzy, though, with some major splits and then others that are subsets. Plenty of my books are in multiple collections. (There are a few tags that I want to turn into collections eventually, too, but I do catalogue management in fits and starts.)

So reviews defaulting to All Books is fine, but a tickbox on a collection for it to be Not Included With Reviews, and a drop-down on the review page to force viewing of reviews that are only from a particular collection (even if it has the tickbox marked?) would probably be the best way of doing it. It's more complicated, though.

>67 keristars: I agree that more options are probably necessary. I also think they should consider adding extra, more explicit default collections that can be used for features in various ways ("Owned", "Already Read", etc.). It's nice to say that Your Library is the "main" collection and that everyone can interpret it as they see fit, but the result is that Your Library has no real meaning and All Books ends up being the default for everything.

If it is really supposed to represent the books that you consider part of your library, whatever that means to you, then it ought to have more of an effect on the other features of the site. For example the list of books you share with others ought to only include those books that both you and the other member have included in the Your Library collection.

You can control whether a collection is used for connection to people, and for recommendations. If we didn't have this, people would scream and yell that we're forcing them to use the collection, when they want to use other collections instead. So we gave them the option.

people would scream and yell that we're forcing them to use the collection, when they want to use other collections instead. So we gave them the option.

I think you're too focused on avoiding at all costs any hint of "forcing people to use something". No one would ever be "forced" to use a collection, regardless of what the different collections did. They would just potentially not benefit from a feature if they chose not to give the system the information required. It doesn't follow that features shouldn't exist just because some people wouldn't use them.

The current collections system is so focused on ultimate flexibility that it doesn't really do anything. The potential of the default collections was never realized; even the couple that did have pre-set meanings (wishlist and currently reading) were ultimately stripped of most of their functionality. So much effort went into the feature, and in the end it's pretty much just a kludge for controlling recommendation lists.

69> people would scream and yell that we're forcing them to use the collection, when they want to use other collections instead.

I realize that some people were upset that they might be forced to use the Your Library collection, I just think they're wrong. :)

Anyway, since when did you care more about upsetting people then having a consistent UI?

69,71> Furthermore, that tick-box for whether a collection is used for connections just goes one way, right? So I can say my wishlist doesn't get included in shared books when compared to other libraries, but if their wishlist collection says to use it for connections I might still be told that we have a shared book which is one of my "real" books and one of their wishlist books. Right?

Under my proposal, the other member could still include wishlist books in their Your Library collection, but if they do it at least says that they have a fairly strong connection to those books.

>71 jjwilson61:, 72 I think it's far too late to do away with the current system; instead, I would propose allowing us to make more comparisons on the basis of different collections as well. Give us a default Owned collection, and the option to see the overlap between our Owned books and other people's Owned books, and so on.

I do wish the default collections /did/ more and /meant/ more. I miss currently reading, I don't want recs based on my wishlist, I do want to connect with people based on what I read...

Of course no two people use the default collections the same. But if they /did/ something, I believe that people would adjust. Because there is, after all, absolutely nothing stopping them from creating a collection exactly as they want and calling it 'My Wishlist' instead if they don't like the things the wishlist 'does'.

I do want to connect with people based on what I read...

This at least is one thing that you can twist the current system to do, though it seems so obviously good that I wish it were more automated. Maybe a month ago I created a Recently Read collection based on the last 200 books I'd read, and I set all my connections and recommendations to be based on that alone. Everything is now much better.

65: jjwilson61: "If it is really supposed to represent the books that you consider part of your library, whatever that means to you, then it ought to have more of an effect on the other features of the site. For example the list of books you share with others ought to only include those books that both you and the other member have included in the Your Library collection."

69 Tim: "You can control whether a collection is used for connection to people, and for recommendations. If we didn't have this, people would scream and yell that we're forcing them to use the collection, when they want to use other collections instead. So we gave them the option."

I don't think it's a question of forcing certain collections to do certain things, but of leveraging the distinctions between collections more than you already do. The ability to control whether a collection is used for recommendations and connections is good, but incomplete, and - at least for the connections part - not fully consistent. "Use for connections" only seems to affect the calculations used in "Members with Your Books" and the "Connections" page. It doesn't affect the "Books you share" module, and I think it's logical to expect that it would. Similarly, it would be nice if these controls could be extended to things like:
- what shows up in the "recently added" module of the profile
- books you share module
- rss feeds
- reviews of your books by others (what you see from the reviews page, and the RSS feed)
- tag cloud
- other statistics

Personally, as I mentioned above, I'd like to see a separate page for organizing collections, maybe for organizing both collections and tags, that would allow us to finesse our settings more, and that wouldn't have to be done through that little lightbox.

76: "Personally, as I mentioned above, I'd like to see a separate page for organizing collections, maybe for organizing both collections and tags, that would allow us to finesse our settings more, and that wouldn't have to be done through that little lightbox."

Yes!

FWIW, I don't think it's useful to veer this away from the original purpose. We can, of course, do so on another thread.

Nothing too original from me:

1) Inclusions
2) "Other authors" getting their own page
3) Lists - personal and shared
4) Do more with all the CK data we've generated. For example, I'd like to be able to favorite awards, series, etc. and only show those (as a separate page so the full list is still available). Or how about making the cover guess data available for viewing / searching? Also, the bug where only one piece of meta data shows on the series pages is still around.
5) An actual bug list. I can never remember what's been reported and what hasn't and it can be frustrating to not know if the powers that be are working on something.

Since Tim mentioned members not suggesting leaps - I'll throw out a sixth and poorly formed idea. I'd love, to the extant allowed by LT's contracts, to get a chance to play around with some of the site wide data. I was thinking of exportable datasets of things like rating frequencies, number of members, etc. for arbitrary sets of books (say per author, all of a series, or defined by a given piece of CK).

At the moment I can only think of two that are big enough to beat well past killing the horse. Keep in mind that this is not my final five -- just something to get out in the open so you guys know I think they're important:

1) Work includes/included in. Presumably phase II of this feature will be to keep the next work up or down the ladder from showing up in our recommendations. As far as I can tell, clicking "no, thanks" just hides the work on the recs page, but doesn't pull up a new rec to make up the full 1000.

2) Other authors. This includes finishing what you started* and, once that's done, linking other authors to author pages.

----
* Compare the two LibriVox versions of Lady Susan I've cataloged. The first was under the old system, where not only were we unable to assign roles to authors, we couldn't even give each additional author his/her own line! Compare the other authors of the first edition to the other authors from the second. See?

I would like to put in a request that:

1) You are able to select more than one book title at a time when adding books for when you are including series

2) I would be curious to know if the booklist importer could also work with Follett/Titlewave accounts so that teachers, who order multiple books at once, could easily make a classroom catalog of books for their students to browse, review, etc... from home (it would also help students to then get more book recommendations during times they are away from their teacher like during breaks)

I would like to see user's rating when I look up a tag. Currently, we can only see how many people used a specific tag, but I would like to be able to see how much people liked that book.

A good reason for being able to set individual collections to not show up on the review page: http://www.librarything.com/topic/92676

Badly formatted or lines that don't break won't make it impossible (or nearly so) to read the other reviews.

Not really improvements, but returns to great and sorely missed features:

1) the TagMirror
2) The profile list of links to LibraryThing pages of authors in your collection

Both have fallen by the wayside, seemingly never to return. Wish they would.

So there's my two cents, for what it's worth!

I'd like to get Tag Watch back - I liked it a lot!

Me too, I miss Tag Watch.

In the recommendations list, if I hit the 'No Thanks!' link is there a way to get that book back in my recommendation list again? That link is so close to the 'Why?' link.

Is there a way to see all my 'No Thanks' books?

87: Nope and nope. It's under discussion on its own thread
http://www.librarything.com/topic/93871

1. Works contained within others, including accommodation of multi-volume anthologies

2. Having works where an author shows up in the Other Authors field nevertheless appear on their primary author page (especially once we're doing Contained and they're listed as contributors)

3. Separating several mis-combined works (copies?) at once

4. Staying at the work page after adding a book and then editing it. How things currently go : I add the book, I go into the work to edit with tags etc, I hit save, it takes me back to my Add Books screen, I have to go back in to select a non-Amazon cover. Since there is no Save that actually means you're done editing, I don't see a benefit to being automatically brought back to Add Books. If you're adding a bunch of books at once, you can hold off on individual edits until they're all listed.

>89 kristenn:
#4 is available now. After adding the book, click on the book's title on your Add Books page, instead of "edit book". This will take you to the work page without automatically flipping you back to Add Books after editing. The link was added to the titles sometime last year, I think.

>90 SylviaC: I tested it that way this morning before posting and it still flips me back, sadly.

Edit: And really a secret solution isn't much of a solution. Is there a time that it's better to be sent back to Add Books?

1. A real export to Excel function! I'd like to run some stats on entry dates, read dates, and so on, by tag and by year and by rating and by a bunch of other stuff, and I have no way to do any of that right now. Additionally, lots of the data I've added to the site is not at all easy to pull out anymore, which really isn't fair -- my data is my data. Export can't be that hard -- it looks like that feature just hasn't been updated for 3 or 4 years. (changed re: post 98)

2. Statistics inside librarything. I'd like to be able to click the statistics page and see some line charts instead of just bar charts, see some information about when my books were finished, see male/female, see some information about distribution and average ratings, and so on, for different sets of books rather than only the entire collection. This has to be more complicated than an export feature that lets me do it myself, but some basic functionality here on the site itself would also be really interesting and useful to me.

3. Better touchstone support. What they said.

4. Better explanation at the "Translate" link. Which shows up randomly in the upper right personal nav area, and lists lots of random languages and has HTML issues. I can't seem to make it appear right now, but it's odd.

5. Change username or password currently lets you change only password.

this seems like a little thing, but I have no idea how hard it is to do. When I click on Connection News, it always loads "all connections" which takes a long time to load and to tell the truth, I REALLY don't care to ever see that list - most of "all connections" is simlar libraries to mine but belonging to people I don't know, and the people I do know are buried. I'd like to be able to choose my default first choice when I click on Connection News, similar to how I can do it on my home page.

Speaking of statistics, getting Group Zeitgeist back would be fun.

92.1>

While you're correct that the export is incomplete -- it omits Collections, primarily -- everything you list (tag, year, rating, entry date) is there in the existing tab-delimited export, so either you're looking at the wrong export or what you want to do involves something other than what you're listing here. (It may be time for me to go find the "Include Collections in export" thread and bump it again.)

>95 lorax:

Not time yet.

95> And Excel can deal with either comma-delimited or tag-delimited which are the two formats that LT exports data in.

92, 95, 97 --

Ooh, you guys are right. Tab-delimited does export everything; only comma-delimited doesn't. That is very strange (though understandable in retrospect), and I hereby amend my requested improvement:

1. Make a note on the More page that csv and tab-delimited exports behave differently and that only tab-delimited will give you all the related info to your books, with csv giving you only a subset of that info (computer limitations explanation optional). This would be helpful because the ordering and presentation of the links currently seems to indicate 1) that csv is primary, and 2) that the export formats are equivalent, when neither of these is true.

Not quite everything - the tab-delimited doesn't give you Collections, or other authors (but neither does CSV).

CSV is primary because it's what can be re-imported into LT. If you want to import books, add them to that database/spreadsheet in that format and they'll import pretty much as is (as I understand it, I don't use import).

I find TD much more useful because more complete - it nearly went away entirely when Tim et al upgraded the import to handle all the stuff in CSV, but enough people (including me) yelled that it stayed. I'd love for it to be truly complete, but it's immensely useful as is.

Yeah, reimport is not perfect. Spreadsheets are one-dimensional things. LT is a complex structure.

>50 SqueakyChu: #7

Squeaky, have you seen these:
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Printables

I recently found the LT bookmarks (by accident). For sure, I'll have a hard time finding them again when I want to print them. :)

I would like to see a method of going from a Series page to the Your Books -> Power Edit page. Would make tagging easier. We can do this for Authors, not Series though.

At least I;ve never found a way.

Thanks,
-drmike

edit: Not sure if that would be small or not or if it would require large amount of code changes. Please excuse me if it would be considered large.

104: A link to "see your books in this series"?

Yup, that would work. I think that's how the author's link is worded. I mean I know the Series page will show which books you have and don't have but you can't do any editing from that page.

I like the ability to mass add tags but with most series that I work with, (ie The RPG games) the authors are all different or not in the db correctly.

I would like to have TagWatch back please. :)

A way to only have to enter a record in one place. The concrete situation: I have wishlists at various amazon sites. I also have lists here of those books, separate from my real library; when I buy something it gets moved from the wishlist-list to the real-library-list. On the other hand, I need to manually add the entry both to the wishlist-list and the true amazon wishlist; some way to do both of those in one fell swoop would be great.

Hmm, could the universal importer (or perhaps it already does...) be told to optionally ignore duplicates? And maybe have it poll a given URL irregularly? That would suffice, I should think.

1) Fixing the Review RSS feed so that the pubDate is the Review Date, not the Entered Date, as it is now. Add Collection and/or tag info to the Books Added RSS feed.

2) Add a "Description" field to the Reading Dates fields. Useful for, say, a short story collection or an omnibus edition, where a set of dates could be entered for each story, which would be specified in the Description field. Or it could be used explain dates ("gave up on book", etc.)

3) A "Reading View" in the catalog that shows books with entered Reading Dates, with multiple copies of books that have multiple reading dates. Visibility of the Description field described above would be ideal, too.

Oh, oh! A way to add a new set of Reading dates from the catalog, so I don't have to go to the Edit page for every reread. A way to see them would be nice to (and export?), but just...maybe, a little 'click for More' in the lower corner of (both?) fields? Or after a doubleclick, but then it gets confusing because the old field is already open for editing.

I apologize a head of time but I am a late comer to this discussion and with over 100 posts, I did not read them all so some or all of what I say my be repeats, but perhaps that will emphasize it more.

1. The ability to add short story titles with the ability to list the book as well...i.e. If I read 1 story out of a collection and I want to catalog the story title with the book being a different field. Tags can accomplish this now, but not so you can search both book title and story title. (to my knowledge)

2. I have said this before but it was probably a year ago and it may not be considered a "small" change but libraries are not just books...I love librarything but I would like to see other format fields available for other forms of media...I still catalog media with the lists options and media type in parenthesis in the title but a separate field option would be nice.

3. Perhaps changing some lingo...Like instead of "Add Books" and "Your Books" perhaps it could be "Add Media" or "Add Materials" and "Your Library" or "Your Materials"...but something that would at least get rid of the use of the word books since that is not all that people are cataloging.

I only have three fixes right now but I want to say its a great program and I am very happy everyone is working so hard on making it better. Thank you for also asking for the users input.

111.2>

That's a massive change, not data-wise but philosophy-wise, and is unlikely to happen in the near future. The official stance is that entering non-book media is neither prohibited nor encouraged; you aren't violating the TOS by entering DVDs or CDs (or perfumes or stuffed bobcats, more's the pity), but neither is Tim going to build features that benefit users doing this and don't apply to books.

111.3>

The day they do that is the day I delete my catalog and go to an offline system. Can't there be one place left in the world that's for books?

I am sure I saw Tim discussing a 'media type' button or checkbox somewhere not so long ago. I'll have a better look when I'm not on my iPad.

We're definitely going to add media type, but it will be designed primarily for ebooks vs paper (and audio). Allow people to mark CDs and DVDs as such won't rock the world, and might conceivably help make it easier to separate out Harry Potter movies from the books.

I'll stop looking now.

114>

might conceivably help make it easier to separate out Harry Potter movies from the books.

If that "separation" means I don't have to see them anymore when I do a search, not just that it's easier to separate them out after the, ah, "well-meaning but deplorably uninformed individuals" combine them with the books, I'm all for it. I don't think there's anything that's going to stop people from willfully combining DVDs with books, if they're already doing so now.

Well, if they had "MOVIE" in front of them, they might. We could also make it impossible to cross that line.

112>

Libraries have never been just books. There have been maps, surveys, and every other popular media since libraries have been around. I would think that if we are discussing philosophy, that then the philosophy would demand a change in the site name from LibraryThing to BookThing if it was only for books and not for library materials. Also there are sites such as WeRead Shelfari, and GoodReads out there for just books but where are the web based cataloging system for everything else including books? I think it would be great to see something as useful and appreciated as LibraryThing to fill this void.

I suggested these options because LibraryThing is becoming quite popular for a low expense cloud cataloging system. I am in the library field and see libraries who would greatly benefit from using LibraryThing and adding media options could really take the site to larger institutions. In order for libraries to feel comfortable to use LibraryThing in a larger context, they would need media options other than just books. I guess that depends on the people creating and running LibraryThing if they want to see their creation being used more widely by actual libraries and these larger institutions instead of the majority being private. But I don't know the stats or facts on how many institutions are on here.

You have checked out LibraryThing for Libraries? It's a different setup, I know - I don't know the details, since I"m not a library.

BTW, Message 117 is from Tim Spalding, the creator of LibraryThing. The L icon indicates an LT developer speaking ex officio.

118> Libraries have never been just for books

I suspect there was a significant period between the deprecation of the scroll and the invention of recorded music when they were, actually. But even for small values of "never", I don't care.

Everyone says that, and frankly, it's nitpicking. Look at the site, all the descriptions, the taglines, the database structure, everything. It's set up for and around books, and people shoehorn other stuff in because they can, and use "Oh, well, one library somewhere cataloged a stuffed bobcat, so it's okay to list perfumes" as justification. That's just ludicrous.

Shelfari and GoodReads aren't a tenth as good as LT is for books; frankly, they aren't serious competitors. There are DVD and music alternatives. There was a "random crap" alternative (squirl.com), but it went bust, which may say something about the advisability of going in that direction.

I don't think Tim wants to compete with existing cataloging systems for libraries (LT for Libraries is not a cataloging system). If he did, then there would be support for checking out books, putting books on hold, and the like. I wouldn't mind if Tim added support for films and music but I'd want him to fix the author system and get the contains/contained-in relationship working first. I've been waiting a long time for those.

Here's a series of requests regarding covers:

1. Add additional links on the 'Book Covers' fun statistics page:

a) Uploaded by you, chosen by you
b) Uploaded by someone else, chosen by you
c) High-quality covers, chosen by you
d) Low-quality covers, chosen by you

The most useful of these would be b and d, since those would allow one to determine which of their books do not have high-quality covers that were uploaded by themselves.

NB: I realize that both of these can only list covers uploaded in the last year and half or so.

2. The ability to specify in a URL that a catalog be displayed in cover view, with covers displayed at a particular size: &cover=165 could force cover view at size 165; &cover=0 could force list view, and a URL without that parameter would use the current display mode (as it does now). This would be extremely useful when creating links to your library and sharing them with people who aren't LT savvy.

3. Ability to view full-screen and full-sized (in a scrolling window, if necessary) versions of high-quality covers. (perhaps accessed via a button in the work lightbox). It's a real shame that members upload high-quality of scans of their covers and then are only able to view those images at a fraction of their size.

4. Re-introduce support for the title parameter within HTML links in the About Me and About My Library sections of the profile page. I set this up so that, for cover images displayed on my profile page, the name of each book would pop up in a tool tip when the mouse passes over the book (like it does when covers are displayed in the catalog).

5. Ability to permanently display fixed-height linked covers that persist over time on a member's profile page. This could be done a variety of ways:

- support a height= parameter within a coverthing_dynamic URL (it currently only supports width=)
- allow widgets to be included on members' profile pages
- ability to display widget-like sets of covers on profile page, based on tags/collections

I'd be really happy if just the first of these approaches could be whipped out (even though coverthing_dynamic requires a little knowledge to use). For those wondering what coverthing_dynamic is, see this discussion for details.

>122 SilentInAWay: I love your first suggestion!

I have a small suggestion.

At the top of the thread in talk there is a link to jump to first unread. If there is no unread messages for you the link is not there. I would like the link to change to jump to the end of the thread.

If you go into a long thread to post and there are no unread messages, its a pain to get to the end.

#124 I asked for the same thing some time ago. The answer really surprised me.

Use the 'End' key, Luke.

Also, the 'Home' key takes you to the top from the bottom.

Admittedly, if you are a mouse power-user, that doesn't help, but I'm a keyboard/shortcut user, so it works for me beautifully.

On a netbook the End key is a 2 handed endeavor. It isn't possible on an Ipod Touch

I also use the search function with the number of the last post, but thats at least 3 clicks.

Good point, Friend of Figs. I'm doing a lot more of my web consuming on my iPad lately and the paradigm is definitely shifting.

You can click on the "post a message" link at the bottom of any message. It will put the post at the end.

On my Macintosh Snow Leopard, the end key function requires that one does a Command - Down arrow effort (Home is a Command - Up arrow effort).

1. "Contained in" relationship. Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease :-)
2. "All your covers" should use MY covers, not Amazon's http://www.librarything.com/allyourcovers
3. I'd like to be able to separate multiple editions from a work at the same time
4. Could someone please solve the Book-Swallowing Black Hole problem http://www.librarything.com/work/10255142 ? It keeps growing and growing...
5. Edition-level series would be useful, considering the way users keep abusing the work-level series in an edition-specific way.

1. Contains/contains in
2. Author separation
3. Fixing the black hole works
4. Preventing combinations when any combination of CK or contains/contained in already exists on the works
5. Getting rid of zero-copy editions, and then fuzzy matching

122> 1. Add additional links on the 'Book Covers' fun statistics page:

a) Uploaded by you, chosen by you
b) Uploaded by someone else, chosen by you
c) High-quality covers, chosen by you
d) Low-quality covers, chosen by you

I like these. On a related note, I'd love to have a way to see my own uploaded covers with a count of the number of members (besides myself) currently using them.

I'd love to have a way to see my own uploaded covers with a count of the number of members (besides myself) currently using them. (#132)

Me too.

132,133>

You know, I almost mentioned that too, but I felt like I was already requesting so much...

Having not really thought about it much more (except when things don't work right) I'll revise my wish-pair from post #80 anyway.

The first item I asked for had an alpha version released to members of the BETA group a while back. Since it's in the works, I won't re-list it here. So my replacement list of small changes will involve finishing what you guys started, fixing stuff, and taking out the (metaphorical) trash.

1.) Finish "Other Authors." See post #80.

2.) Clean up zero-copy editions. At the absolute very minimal least*, get rid of any zero-copy editions that share an ISBN and identical/nearly identical title and/or author** with non-zero editions. Failing that, just hide them already and de-fuzz the "recommended combinations" thing. (Failing that give us a good excuse not to go separate out zero-copy editions.)

3.) More nuanced book-cover statistics, like mentioned in posts 132-134.

4.) Fix the absent "why?" problem on Automatic Recommendations. This happened before the improved recommendation algorithm introduced a month or two ago, and is still happening. The problem is highlighted by the red bits here:


-----
* Yes, making that point in not one but three adjectives is intentional. Completely intentional.
** I would be more clear here, but I'm at work, and have to be ready to drop everything and, well, work.

Suggesting combining on ISBN's. :)

At the absolute very minimal least*, get rid of any zero-copy editions that share an ISBN and identical/nearly identical title and/or author** with non-zero editions.

I thought that was the whole point of keeping the zero-copy editions. That is the nearly identical title and/or author is what allows similar misspellings to be automatically combined into the same work. The only problem I see is when the ISBN is for an entirely different work.

My point was that often, these same misspellings exist already in non-zero-copy editions. Where they don't, I can sorta see keeping them. But a misspelling appears twice for a work, once in an edition with at least one copy, and a second time in a zero-copy edition, why should the zero-copy edition remain to clutter things up? Keeping them makes finding other, strictly-problematic combinations that much harder to find and weed out.

Maybe a better solution would be to have a way to hide the zero-copy editions on the editions page.

I have a few items-don't know if they are large or small

1. Make it possible to get a list of all the members of a group - not just the recent ones, but all members. (Don't tell me to look at Group Zeitgeist - it doesn't work.)

2. Make it easier to combine tags and collections in multiples - if I want to see a combination of a tag within two collections or two tags in one collection - don't make me feel like I need a Computer science degree to do that.

3. In Add Books - can we get a field that specifies type - i.e. Hardback, Paperback, Audio, Ebook - so that in the search the results are only the type you are looking for

4. We have buttons on the Main Page to add to your library and add to the wishlist . Give us a way to see in the copies whether a book is a wishlist or library copy - in other words if there are 35 members who have this book - how many have it on their wishlist and how many actually have it in their library?

5.Allow for multiple reviews of a book by a member so that in the Omnibus version which has "5" books you can put all 5 reviews instead of having to add all 5 books to record each review.

I also would like to see fields for Page number and location as others have requested. I also remember hearing about another color check mark being assigned by the members so that the member could specify their own collection, but I ever heard what happened about it.

>#139
Only if we could have a way to get rid of the ones that are, in fact, zero-copy editions of other works.

141> I meant to have an option to hide, so you could still see the zero-copy works if you need to. Perhaps segregating them to a different section of the page would be better.

>143 AnnaClaire:
Are you talking about zero-copy works or zero-copy editions? The former is hidden some of the time, and all that remains is to hide it the rest of the way. The latter is the problem I'm talking about.

144> I was talking about zero-copy editions, which if they are a problem cluttering up the Editions page could be segregated to a different section of the page or optionally hidden behind a see-more button.

Ah. You said something about works in post 142.

I'll call that idea an acceptable work-around, but only if the "see more" thing says it's for zero-copy editions (and it doesn't hide anything else).

1) Some way of recognizing multiple authors or contributors. I know that you can enter that data now, but does anything happen with it? Even changing the primary author in my catalog doesn't make it the work show up on that author's page unless I separate it from the other books.

2) Separate author pages! It is impossible to convince authors to get accounts here when their books are stuck on a page with another author's information.

3) I would really like venue pictures to come back.

4) I want the ability to edit author pictures that I've uploaded without the picture vanishing...

It seems like whenever I have a problem, it turns out to be a known bug that hasn't been addressed. It really discourages me from using the site for anything beyond simple cataloging.

Hiding zero-copy editions is not an acceptable work-around when you're trying to separate/combine them into the correct overall work. As for segregating and decluttering, they're lumped at the bottom of the Editions page. If there are problematic pieces, I like knowing right where they're going to be.

148> Hiding zero-copy editions is not an acceptable work-around when you're trying to separate/combine them into the correct overall work.

Well then don't hide them when you're doing that. The suggestion was for someone to have to option to hide them.

>149 jjwilson61:
Exactly. That's the point. It's not about forcibly hiding the zero-copy editions, it's about keeping them out of the way for those of us who don't want to deal with them. It's no more forcible than the new "shelves toggle" thing Tim just introduced.

I'm OK with the option to show/hide if the toggle holds globally, but I won't accept having to click on a "show all" switch every time I'm working on editions. Deal? ;)

Well. the option would only apply to the Editions page, but what you want is for your LT to remember your choice so that the next time you visit the page it will still show you the zero-copy editions. Right. And you probably want it stored in the database and not cookies so that it'll apply to more than just the computer you're on.

If by "apply to the Editions page," you mean every Editions page I'll ever visit after making my initial toggle selection, yes. If you mean I'll have to make the decision for each page, no.

To be honest, I'd rather have a global preference, too. Hiding them is kinda pointless if I gotta wait for them to load & display -- before I can say not to -- every time I view an Editions page.

Am I in the right place? (I can't bring myself to read the whole thread to find out.) I am loving the "Controversial Books" addition! Would it involve too much work to add the standard deviation somewhere on each book's page? I'd find that very helpful.

>155 LizzieD:
I think you want this thread in the New Features group.

Thank you, AnnaClaire. I'll repost there forthwith!

1. What about a new theme or at least the abilty to switch color schemes or use a custom stylesheet? I love LT but for what it does and certainly not for how it looks (rather *despite* how it looks). My home page has three shades of brown, green, flashy blue text. It is not easy on the eyes. Since I'm here often, it is annoying. Different color schemes (blue, silver, light gray or something like that) could easily be implemented by switching a few css files, and would make a difference.

2. I want to see My Books using the Covers view by default.

3. Why do the Home and Profile tabs have Home and Profile subtabs?

4. Inclusions, for anthologies

5. By default, I view LT in French, but usually after a few clicks on the site it reverts to English. Personally, I don't care, but it might be off-putting to some non-English speaking users.

158: Yunno what? I *know* we have, or at least used to have, a way to switch "themes" in LibraryThing. It was one of those for-fun features that I don't think ever really caught on, but I know it used to be possible. I can't find it anywhere now, though, so maybe it's been removed.

(have I mentioned how awesome you are lately, Zoe? Thank you!)

:D Thank you! And you're welcome.

160: Thank you for finding that so I didn't have to. :)

>160 _Zoe_: Thanks, I did not know about that. Unfortunately, the existing styles were designed for LT in 2008 and things must have evolved... for instance, they apply to the profile page, but somehow not to the home page... I still think it might be beneficial to have somewhere in the *user settings* the ability to choose among simple color schemes.

> 164 I agree that this would be nice. I have a passionate love for LT and a passionate hatred for its color scheme.

I don't know how much work/time/effort it would take, though, so I'm not sure how far up my list of priorities it would be.

Multiple Authors. Seriously.

Yesterday I wanted to know who the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is. So I went to the work page, where LT told me with graceless idiocy that the author is Jane Austen. Yes, of course I know she wrote the original version. I wanted to know who wrote the zombies part. I was mildly annoyed, but I figured, “No problem; I’ll just scroll down and I’ll find it in Common Knowledge or something.”

As if.

So I went to Google, which directed me to the info well-nigh instantly.

This is a specialized book site which claims to offer a “library-quality catalog.” But I had to go to a generalist web site to actually find an author for a book.

I’d laugh, but to quote Bucky the Cat, “Unfortunately, the sad kills the funny.”

You could have found it by clicking "Editions" on the work page.

Of courses there are various workarounds. But it's ridiculous that workarounds are required.

1: Now that you've found the author, you can add the information to the disambiguation notice ("This work is listed with two different authors: Jane Austen and ____") or to the book description.

2: The editions page is pretty standard for finding variations in title and author, I thought, since the work page will always show the "winner" (or canonical title). I don't think of the editions page to see if names of other authors are listed is a workaround.

166> It says Jane Austen because the cover of the book lists Austen's name first. Yes, multiple authors really needs to be . . um . . fixed. Or done. Or something.

I hate that all those "other" books are on Austen's author page.

After due consideration of all points of view, I'm sticking with "this is incredibly lame."

171: And I agree.

Yes, there are workarounds. But really, there should be a better way of dealing with this kind of thing. I don't know *what*, but seriously, everyone should know right off the bat that Jane Austen did *not* write the zombies-book. The fact that LT says she does.... it's frustrating.

library-quality catalog

Well, strictly speaking we offer you the ability to catalog your books in library quality. And if you had added the book you would have noticed that it had both authors.

That is to some extent distinct from what information we assemble on a work page. While this case is one where, simply, there is one answer, the whole point of the work page is to make a page that doesn't, can't and won't exist in a library catalog. You don't, "catalog" works in libraryland.

The problem is in distinguishing between cases like this--where there are two authors on every level of truth--and cases where there aren't. An example would be that many of the editions of Pride and Prejudice have secondary authors who edited, introduced or annotated the edition. Telling those apart is fairly hard.

But yes, I see your point.

Tim, thanks for responding.

Oh yeah, and while I'm thinking about this: The issue is more nettlesome for academic books, because it makes it harder to follow up on other works by all authors.

For example, Stochastic Approximation and Recursive Estimation has two authors, Nevel'son and Has'minskii. Knowing both authors would be helpful in following up on this subject.

My most-wished-for improvement is to have a way of choosing "today's date" for the Date Acquired and Reading Dates.

By the way, I LOVE LibraryThing.

>175 MNMom: In Edit Book, type the word today in either field (or both) and Save.

>175 MNMom:, 176 This works from Your Library view as well.

>176 kevmalone:, 177 Ah, a trick! It's a little disconcerting that you never see the change, since once you save you go back to the page you came from. But thanks!

I think "yesterday" and "tomorrow" work as well. But "Tuesday" gives you next Tuesday as per a bug report in Bug Collectors, but you *can* enter "last Tuesday" if you like.

Aaaaand for completeness:

This only works in English.

This only works in English.

No chance of a change there, I think. The PHP command we're using, strtotime(), is not internationalized that I know.

>181 timspalding: Yup, brightcopy picked up on that I think (h/t).

For even more completeness, you will see the change if you do it from Your Library rather than the edit page.

>183 _Zoe_: Sunday Zoe already told us this in 177. Incomplete handover at shift change?

>184 kevmalone: No, I said that you could enter the data from the catalogue. Then there was the separate question of whether you could see what had just happened: "It's a little disconcerting that you never see the change, since once you save you go back to the page you came from." Entering the data from the catalogue avoids this problem; the change is visible immediately.

In order of personal priority:

1) Add a CK field for other languages and other-language titles.

Why?

-From a work page, I could see if a book has been published in English (or any other language I can read) without checking the editions and even if the book isn't in LT. E.g., the book may have the Dutch and Swedish versions on LT but I can look and see if there is a German, etc. title for it. EVEN BETTER--if there were a CK page for alternate languages by author instead of work so that I could see how many of e.g., Zweig's works have been translated into English, into German, into French, etc.

-Once there is enough of this data, perhaps it could be displayed on the combine/separate works page for the author and it would make it easier for combiners to find the right way to combine translations.

-It's CK, and the format is already there, so the solution wouldn't have to be that difficult to implement. And I think it will be at least as useful, if not more, than many CK fields.

Other recommended improvements:

2) Expand "other authors" functionality to books entered prior to 2007. (Even if it means having users do the change-over manually).

3) More improvements on the reading timeline (e.g., take out date of entry, allow vertical scrolling).

4) Separate author pages for shared author pages.

5) Bring back group zeitgeist--or at least make it possible to view all members of a group.

186> Your #1 has already been done. Last night, actually! Check the "Original Title" and "Alternate Title" CK on a work page :D You can add multiple lines to each, too, which is helpful if the book was published simultaneously in two different places (so two different titles), or if the original title is in a non-Latin character set.

I'm not sure if all the functionality is there that you're hoping for, but the basic fields have been added!

>187 keristars: But the instructions below the entry box say to avoid foreign-language titles for "alternate titles".

188> Yeah, like I said, basic fields, maybe not the full functionality that you want. Honestly, though? if it's a work that is commonly known by a foreign-language title as much as the English title, I'd still put it in the Alternate Title box, if it's not a fit for Original Title. It depends on the situation, but particularly if the "winning" title isn't English but isn't the Original Title. Canonical should be the English one... (This happens with certain manga that got licensed for translation in languages other than English before English, so more people have the French or German or whatever copes than English ones.)

And of course I'm just talking about .com here, but it might be useful on other language sites, too.

I went ahead and put in the alternate title for Thomas Hobbes' "On The citizen": De Cive. I think it may have been written in Latin originally (don't remember), but this is the one work in English, whose Latin title I easily remembered.

187 But the instructions below the entry box say to avoid foreign-language titles for "alternate titles".

Actually it says Avoid titles already listed as the Canonical or Original titles as well as foreign-language titles available on the "Details" tab.

What I'm trying to do is avoid having users enter—and have to find—information that's already on the work details tab. I mean, we know what the French edition of Harry Potter is called. It's not helpful to add it to CK.

Did others misunderstand this? Should I link to it from the explanations?

Oh, the poor work details tab :(. I still wish you hadn't taken away all the classification details.

192>

I still wish you hadn't taken away all the classification details.

Me too. All that beautiful, beautiful data, hidden away.

Let me preface this list by saying I love this site. Thus, this list is purely in the spirit of making a great thing even better...

1) Book reviews for (and in the details of) each novel: This has been discussed to death, especially in a thread I started recently. Thus, I won't elaborate. :)

2) Some sort of better flagging / sorting / filtering method for the voluminous 'talk' and 'group'
forums: Perhaps fueled by the fact that I am a new member, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume and diversity of posts int he forum. A more 'advanced' way to filter, sort, etc. these posts / topics to the 'meat and potatoes' I'm interested in would be a great addition (IMO). Perhaps additional flags? Some advanced followed lists/ features based on keywords? There may be some of this already in the site that I have not found, for this I apologize.

3) Edit / Modify / Remove blog posts : Like in talk, we also have errors, mistakes, or simply a wish to better word our responses to the blog posts. A way to update what we wrote, same as in talk, would be nice.

4) A more feature rich mobile site (that does not cater to iPhone, droid, etc. users): I shamefully admit, in this day and age I do not own a smart-phone. Currently, I can access the full fledged site, but some features (such as posting like this) do not function on my phone's browser (Opera Mini 5.1). I would, however, like to be able to access this site without too much in the lines of confines. I don't know the absurdity of this request, but I'd wager it is a pipe dream... I assume this posting is beyond-mobile in nature.

5. More options on the homepage for the 'search' button : I'd like to see the options, on the main page, to search more works than just my library. If I'm in a bookstore trying to find a review on a novel I just found, this would be helpful for quick access. Also (doesn't really fit, but I'm throwing it in here... I only have 5) I'd like to see the ability to sort reviews, so that in the same bookstore example, I can find the medium review - skip the extremes (5 star / 1 star).

Just an aside that addresses mrdouglas's point #2.

I joined a lot of groups that dealt with things I'm interested in. Then I changed my Talk setting to My Groups. This whittles the list of threads down to a manageable level, and also includes all the Standing Groups. I don't miss anything important to the site, and I don't have to wade through piles of "stuff" I don't care about.

This may helpful to other "newbies" as well.

194> #1. Maybe you should link to the thread that you started, because LT already has book reviews and I can't figure out what you want beyond that.

ETA: Plus, I didn't join every group, so unless that thread was in this group there's no reason to suppose I might have seen it already.

>196 jjwilson61: I think he meant discussions, not reviews.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/101776

>196 jjwilson61:, 197: Yes, I did.

Sorry about that. :(

Don't worry, no harm done :)

1 Tagmirror
2 Tagmirror
3 Tagmirror
4 Tagmirror
5 Tagmirror

WHEN WILL 'Tagmirror' BE BACK UP?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Tagmirror as it was used too many resources and won't be back, although maybe something that updates only on demand or once in a blue moon might be possible.

>201 jjwilson61: That seems like such an easy and obvious compromise that I really don't know why it hasn't been implemented already.

1. More visualization of my collection. I'm thinking along the lines of the great data visualization features Google Analytics has. I would love to see an animated graph of how my collection grew, what tags I added, etc. Large circles for popular tags, small circles for unpopular tags, that sort of thing. Circles bouncing through time as other tags get priority. I would be so cool to see how my interests shift over time. Ideally, it would be as easy to use as the Google thingy where you can select your own values for the X and Y axis and then press play.

2. Works within works.

3. Ability to add someone else's books to my library even if they are not available in any catalog yet. For example: my mother and I both got the same obscure book. She entered it manually because it wasn't in any catalog. I should be able to add it to my library from hers instead of entering it manually myself.

4. Add Europeana as a catalog. I won a T-shirt with this suggestion a while back, so I'm hoping it will be implemented one of these days.

5. Integration with Google Books so you can search books full-text. I've exported all my ISBNs and imported them in Google Books for that purpose, but that doesn't work for the large part of my collection that is older than ISBN.

203:
2, do you mean like anthologies or short stories in a collection and such? If so, it's coming, sometimes. It's in beta right now, a "contained/contains in" feature that will allow the linking and data collection of short stories with the books they are featured in, etc.

3. That used to be possible, and Tim said it was taken away because of "bad data", but a LOT of people ask for something similar to be implemented.

204 / 2 Yes, I'm talking about collections of stories, omnibuses, articles in yearbooks et cetera. I would love to have a contained-in relationship between works so you can describe a work iteratively. Great to hear that such a feature is being developed.

204 / 3 Personally, I think it should be up to the person adding the data to decide if he/she thinks the data is good enough to copy just like I can decide how badly I want to enter a book manually. But I can see where Tim's coming from.

205> It's a matter of hidden bad data - like, the person who entered it entered four books by the same author by entering the same one four times and changing the title. Not the publication data, not the ISBN, just the title. Those sort of things were the bad data that was getting propagated. Unfortunately there are two kinds of people who want a real Add Book button - those that want the precisely correct (and checked) data on obscure books that aren't in the sources; and those who just want a book (by title and author) and don't care about any of the other data. And there are more of the latter than the former (not in Talk, probably, but on LT).

#206 Unfortunately, that makes sense :-( Thanks for clearing this one up for me. I thought it would be a no-brainer to add but now see there are more issues there than I had originally thought.

One workaround - if you open your mother's copy of the book in one tab, and Manual Entry in another, you can cut-and-paste the data. Not nearly as fast as a one-button add, but easier than thinking and typing all the info yourself.

#208 That's what I've been doing :-)

I am not sure if this was mentioned before or if it's already possible, I couldn't find anything related to this.

It would be great if we could export the list of recommendations - is there a way to do this?

>210 Aristocats: The only method I know of is called "Select all, copy, paste".

Yeah, that is a way. Unfortunately, the listing doesn't have the ISBNs visible
and I wanted to import this list in my wishlist on a trading site, where ISBNs are required. Maybe someday...

Thanks for the reply though.