LibraryThing adds 10 new libraries
LibraryThing has made another great leap forward. Until now LibraryThing drew exclusively on the Library of Congress and the five national "Amazons."
Today ten more libraries have joined the mix:
It is a starter list. The US additions are a strong start. I hope Canadians, Australians and Danes will be happy seeing their national libraries included. Brits may feel the absence of Cambridge, Oxford and the British Library—the latter two are open and will be added. The French and Germans were, I confess, slighted, although the Canadian National Library has a lot of French literature. And what can I say to the Brazilians who have flocked in such numbers after LT was profiled in O Globo? I've looked and I will keep looking. I have an open Z39.50-based library in Portugal, but it is either down or on the blink. There are also some private universities in Brazil that are said to have open catalogs. I will find something for you!
There are a number of ramifications to the change that aren't yet resolved:
Today ten more libraries have joined the mix:
- United States: Boston University, The University of California system, The University of Chicago, Yale University
- Britain: The National Library of Scotland, The London School of Economics, The National Library of Wales
- Canada: The Canadian National Catalogue
- Australia: The National Library of Australia
- Denmark: Det Kongelige Bibliotek
It is a starter list. The US additions are a strong start. I hope Canadians, Australians and Danes will be happy seeing their national libraries included. Brits may feel the absence of Cambridge, Oxford and the British Library—the latter two are open and will be added. The French and Germans were, I confess, slighted, although the Canadian National Library has a lot of French literature. And what can I say to the Brazilians who have flocked in such numbers after LT was profiled in O Globo? I've looked and I will keep looking. I have an open Z39.50-based library in Portugal, but it is either down or on the blink. There are also some private universities in Brazil that are said to have open catalogs. I will find something for you!
There are a number of ramifications to the change that aren't yet resolved:
- Although I now have richer data and can populate additional fields, including series, language and edition, I have not yet exposed them to viewing and editing.
- You will note that newly added books lack accents. Look on the bright side—they don't have the wrong accents.
- Fortunately, accents are coming. New books have a checkbox for "Update as cataloging data improves." Keep this checked and accents will soon appear where once there was none. All I have to do is crack the obscure character set Marc records employ...
posted by Tim at 5:31 AM
38 Comments:
Thank you!!
But.. if I search on ISBN with Amazon/Australian selected, nothing is found until i click "more libraries" then "NLA". Is this intentional?
(still, very grateful to have the NLA though!)
Oh dear, 3rd comment in a row. Anyway, when I do the above, to add a new book, the comments I have entered in the comments field don't go onto my record.
Thank you for the update feature.
Hi Tim, great work!
Only remember the Spanish speaking world... we are 400 million people.
best regards
books4life
Delighted to hear the British Library will soon be added...waiting very anxiously for this. Cheers!
(2.45pmGMT) The site seems to be unavoidably busy at the moment - been getting nothing but 'mysql_connect(): Too many connections' errors for more than an hour now. :(
Even if the site don't work very well at the moment, I must say the new libraries was a joy ...just waiting for the swedish to be added then I can have all my books on the list :)
Thanks for all these libraries. I would second anonymous' request for Spanish-speaking libraries/bookstores and also confirm anonymous' comments about the errors (Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/catalog_bottom.php on line 283)
Is there a way we can get an option to change the number of books viewed per virtual shelf?
Username: Gilroy
Not related to the new libraries... why do I have a tag labeled "l\\" that says it belongs to one book but no books actually display under that tag? And why does it keep coming back no matter how many times I delete it?
One slight display issue.
One of my books _Plants Of The Gods_ has quite a long MARC21 260 record which exceeds the space allocated and goes over the line on the right hand side.
I have also seen an extremely long 245 record (I had to delete the book, it was for a different edition) which caused a horizontal scroll bar.
Thanks for all the new libraries! Almost all my queries are getting hits now.
A problem since the update: my tags are vanishing. That is, when I enter the search terms, and then enter tags in the tag window underneath, unless I stick to a basic "Amazon" search, my tags vanish. When I click on the title to add it to my catalog, it gets added, but without the tags I had entered when I began the search, and I have to stop, edit ,and add them again. Can this be fixed?
Some responses:
1. Yes, there is something up with Amazon.co.uk and using ISBNs. It's been happening a while and mystifies me. I'll look at it again soon.
2. I won't forget the Spanish-speaking world.
3. The dropped-tag problem is now fixed. The '// one needs fixing.
Thank you!!!
On MARC8 encoding -- what system are you using to do your z39.50 queries? Yaz has a built-in converter from MARC to UTF-8, which works fairly well -- though I've gotten in the habit of filtering my output through another UTF composition filter to improve diacritic display somewhat. If you have questions, email the address in my profile.
(I'll email you to.) Yes, I'm now using Yaz. No, it's not Marc-8, which I gather is what I'd get if I were using Marc XML, but ISO2709, what non-XML Marc records are in. (If this doesn't make sense to you, I am probably misunderstanding it.)
Laura, editing existing records brings up a tickybox for just this purpose - check it, and I guess it will work in the future!
Another blip - if you select, say, all the books by one author (using 'Search') you can't rearrange them within that display, whether by tag or title or whatever. I thought this used to work but I might be misremembering. It would be very useful to have that working; finding duplicate titles is taking longer than it ought.
Amazon Japan is no longer working. Hopefully this is just a temporary problem? Tim, do you ever get any sleep? It is a great deal of fun watching this Thing as it grows!
Sara
Amazon Japan's working again. Amazon.CO.jp—who would have thunk it?
Is being able to tag or re-tag multiple items at once still on the in-progress list? Or did it get vetoed and I missed seeing it?
Access to NLA much appreciated!
But as alasen pointed out, unfortunately it doesn't default to their collection even having made that selection in the drop-down menu...
The new libraries have been brilliant. One thing that does puzzle me. I notice that when looking at other users' catalogues, I can see books that I have, not shown as "shared books" - is that because they are different editions?
Firstly, when do the items ticked get refreshed/updated.
Some quick ideas.
Can we have a search that pulls up all the books in your library that have the "Refresh ..." option ticked?
Can we have a search that pulls up all the books that were manually entered (yeah I know I should have used a tag)? If that isn't possible, what about books with no additional cataloguing info (ie. no attached LC or MARC record)?
Now, with more libraries these might be found in some of the other libraries.
Is there a way we can have an option of hiding the list of all the libraries above the search results when adding books? It makes it so much easier when all the results are at the top and you don't have to scroll past the list of all the libaries to see your search results.
Are you seeing the library list each time? Try quitting out of your browser and coming back in. It shouldn't be acting that way. I'll look into it.
Tim
Thank you, thank you. I see there are now even MORE libraries to choose from. Turkey and South Africa! Wow.
I couldn't be more excited. Well, if you could get a Beijing/Shanghai library and a Taipei library I would actually be more excited but I'm pretty near my limit now :-)
hmmm, actually Amazon Japan is still not working for me. I can find the book by ISBN at their web site, copy the title, paste it into Library Thing, but it gives me zero results. It was working up until today....
No hurry... just reporting back.
Sara
Two thoughts on Amazon Japan (I'm picking my topics right now).
1. There's something wrong with ISBNs. I think maybe they've moved to EANs, but I need to check.
2. If you get the bookmarklet (see "Extras") you can just click on it when you're at Amazon and it will add it to your catalog without any cutting and pasting.
The "more libraries" links have stopped working in my searches. Anybody else having this problem?
I tried the bookmarklet in Amazon Japan. (Doesn't work in Safari, but Firefox is fine). It appears to function, but it isn't actually adding the book.
Strange that I could do it before, but can't now.Go figure...
I am in love with this. IN LOVE. The social networking features are _great_.
Here's an idea for a feature: a way to request to borrow tomes from other users/friends, and a way for you to track which books of yours are lent out, and to whom - be they librarything users or otherwise.
the amazon bookmarklet thingamajig seems to be misbehaving...
Thanks. The libraries broke Amazon. Fixed now. Thanks for noticing.
There seems to be a problem with posting to comments (on a Mac running OS X 10.4.2, using Firefox 1.0.3). Each entry into the box (each character) causes the user to be bounced out of the entry field and into a search entry for the browser window itself. Bizarre.
Re: Firefox bug. That's exceedingly peculiar—I'd be interested to hear if it's happend to anyone else. For starters, that's the exact configuation I have—the configuration most likely to work. For another it's the sort of thing a web page shouldn't be able to do—jump you to a tab outside of the page. For another, the natural tab order puts the Google box at least two away. Finally, I don't mess around with tab orders or cause anything to happen when the field changes—the page is completely dumb. Hmm!
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Best thing ever, I know my weekend is booked
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