How to do a LibraryThing forum
I've been thinking about a forum. In his comment on the last post, Felius raised some important issues. He asked for a forum that was...
I am also interested in how the forum can be integrated into the rest of the site so, for example, a forum conversation about The Lion the Witch and the Wardobe is somehow referenced on the book page. There are, after all, 145 LibraryThing users who have that book, but only a select few read the blog. At the same time, I don't want to add a "mini forum" to every book. Most books just don't have the necessary critical mass. Have you looked at the fora that are attached to every film on IMDB? Blech.
Felius' closing comment also deserves quoting:
Some random thoughts:
"... integrated into LibraryThing and uses the same user profile. And maybe lets us discuss books as well ("See what are people are saying about Cryptonomicon" for example), and maybe doesn't really distinguish between the two, but kind of integrates the general idea of "discussion" into the whole site."This is very much what I was thinking. The reason LibraryThing doesn't have a forum yet is precicely because I don't want to slap up a PhpBB board on with its different look and user system. (For the same reason, I have resisted using my own Mothboard site.)
I am also interested in how the forum can be integrated into the rest of the site so, for example, a forum conversation about The Lion the Witch and the Wardobe is somehow referenced on the book page. There are, after all, 145 LibraryThing users who have that book, but only a select few read the blog. At the same time, I don't want to add a "mini forum" to every book. Most books just don't have the necessary critical mass. Have you looked at the fora that are attached to every film on IMDB? Blech.
Felius' closing comment also deserves quoting:
"Because, like it or not, LibraryThing is no longer just about cataloguing your books — it's about mixing with the sort of people who think that's a wonderful idea. ;)"I'm torn on this. I do not want LibraryThing to devolve into a general book site. I do not want to scare away people who "just want to catalog their books." There are a lot of such people—perhaps a majority on the site now. Whatever solution I choose must be and feel completely optional, and not change the main focus. Social features have surely become more important—and I am conscious that, to be a success, LibraryThing must keep at least some people around after they have entered their collection—but cataloging remains the core. It is what LibraryThing does best.
Some random thoughts:
- A forum should allow users to embed links to users, tags, books and authors (a real author system is coming). Doing this so that it's easy will be an interesting UI challenge. Perhaps each thread can be tagged, and anyone can add tags.
- The system should highlight conversations about books you own. This information should be available in the forum and via RSS.
- Perhaps a forum should display user names with the number of books they share with you after it, or a similarity percentage yet to be introduced. This will solve my main objection with an open book discussion:I don't care what most people think; most people have different tastes than I do. Of course, I care what all of YOU think! :)
- The system should sharply distinguish between past and present conversations, at least on a book page. You don't want to be breathlessly told that people are talking about a book and then discover the conversation is two years old.
- I am dead-set against multi-threaded discussion. I hate hate hate it. I expressed this view before and one user disagreed—former user, I should say, but I know nothing about his tragic, unusual and bitterly ironic death.
posted by Tim at 1:18 AM
31 Comments:
Although I love the idea of the discussion being centered around a particular book (a la the ideas in Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society), I agree that for many, maybe most, books a forum for each book might not work. What about, instead, being able to from discussion s to books, authors, and tags? (Maybe using bbcode-like tags within the messages, even.) Then you could use that info in the other direction to link "related discussions" on the book's/author's/tag's page.
Obviously, with such a system comes the potential for abuse. Maybe a slashdot-style karma system or the like would be appropriate to regulate the number of links someone can generate to rate-limit any link spamming. I suppose, if you've got CPU to burn, you could even calculate the effect of karma differently for each user depending on the similarity score of those who rated a message or discussion.
[Grrr! Blogger doesn't allow the CITE element in posts. That's really annoying!]
Tim, while the idea of discussions about books, authors, etc. is exciting what we really need is a forum to discuss LibraryThing. I assume there are other places on the web to discuss books. Certainly, integrating such with a book's or author's page here would add value to the site but to me that is secondary.
I strongly agree that the first, if not the main, discussion forum should be one for and about library thing.
hailelib (pwh)b
I'll second your trepedation at having LT become a general book site. I can see how having an explosion of author, book, and subject forums could suck up your development resources real quick. And there are many sites that already offer that. But a good forum to discuss LT itself would be nice.
My initial motivation was to catalog our library for insurance reasons; much easier to replace a library if you know exactly what was in it. Having used it, I've found many other great things about it, but the catalog is still the heart of it.
One thing I would like to see developed over time is a way to build associations among books beyond the "suggestions" list (which is really more the coincidence of ownership). For example, I have a pretty good library on historical furniture and woodworking. Of the books I own, some are great resources, some aren't worth their binding. Other than rating the books, there really isn't a way for me as an individual to say "if you like this book, you should look at these as well." I guess I could do that in the Comments, but it isn't very elegant. I'm thinking of it for research purposes: exposing those great little treasures that don't show up in Amazon or even in the LOC. Maybe that's getting off of LT's primary purpose too, but for folks who research obscure subjects, it could really help. Maybe just improved search capabilities might do this.
Great job, keep it up.
Why not have a sort of "trackback" feature, so that when a book or an author is linked to from the forums, a trackback link appears on the book/author page?
I'd like the option to review a book that is not in my catalog but one that I have read and liked. I have this option on amazon. The only way I can review a book here is if it is in my own library. There are lots of books that I have read (checked out of library or borrowed) that I don't personally own. I don't want to put a book in my catalog unless I personally own it.
I agree with Bibliovore's line of thinking. The catalogue is the base but once I've done this I want to find leads to books that interest me in similar libraries. To this end it would help if more similar libraries gave some guidance through star ratings and wrote reviews rather than just leaving these blank. This extra input should produce a more interesting forum/ forums. Mark (Miro)
Well, with the launch of print.google.com today ( I have already found a ISDN # there and added it to my Librarything catalogue) I agree with Tim about threaded forums having the tendency to become cacophonous.
Private specialized discussions between readers who enjoy the same book would not mess up the simplicity of this site.
A quick test of a simple book discussion forum,that is linked to this site, would be a good start.
This blog has been very useful our input into your technical tweak phase.
Nevertheless, we should put our books on the shelf before reading and discussing them.
What about some kind of "free-form" forum where people can introduce topics however they like: author, book, genre, whatever. Then there is some way that mentions of authors and books become automatically hyperlinked. Also the db could watch when books and authors are mentioned and put notes on the pages to say "this book/author" has been discussed in the last hour/week/month etc.
I can see why you want to put serious thought into this before proceeding, and I greatly appreciate it.
I do like the ides of there being a tag of some sort that shows up with either book or author to indicate that there is a discussion about them. Could this be handled like reviews have been, where there is an icon on the record, and a screen you can go to that shows the books in your collection that are being discussed?
I'd like a way to indicate which books I've read, but don't own; about half the suggestions I get are books I've already read.
"there really isn't a way for me as an individual to say "if you like this book, you should look at these as well"
I agree, a more specific way to suggest books would be nice; perhaps "User Recomendations" could be an option added to the social data page.
I'd love to discuss books with people who have them - but also think that it would be nice to open it up to the general public as well. A simplistic way of viewing it could be ala a 'Talk' page on a Wikipedia article - a free form page, editable by anyone, available to everyone.
I agree though, that the primary objective should always be about LibraryThing itself, as much as talking about books appeals to me.
Threading / Non-Threading
Well, non-threading is OK for small very focused items. Threading is better for larger, or less well focused items.
I've used both and I much prefer a forum that thread. Having said that forum implementation can make threaded topics hard to use (as you don't know what was posted recently).
Although I agree with some of the contributors to this conversation that discussing books is secondary, there are various issues that have upto now been addressed by comments on a user's profile page but really ought to be more prominent. Questions on cataloguing, questions on why they have tagged a book with a particular tag etc.
I would put nearly anything to do with cataloguing (which should be the core functionality of this site) before a forum though. For me the most important changes are
a) Support for journals, periodicals, and other serial works.
b) Support for table of contents (with tags/comments/reviews for individual entries in the contents) including auto-extraction from the MARC 505 field where it exists.
The first forum that needs to be introduced is a forum for discussing LibraryThing, and particularly help and bug-reporting forums.
I really do have other places on the Net to discuss books....
Perhaps you could offer both long-lived discussions (like those covering the site itelf, or catalogging in general), as well as time-limited discussions (e.g., "book club"-type discusisons of a given title/author/series).
The LT-specific stuff can be kept active longer, and the Book Club discussion can be closed and archived after a time.
Honestly, I expected to see more people reviewing books, and I hoped to use those reviews as a means for selecting new thigns to read, and if discussions take off, I'd really like to be able to read through them later on to find out what's said.
I don't like moderated discussions (like the H-NET mailing lists), because while the signal-to-noise is kept fairly clean, the time delay is excruciating!
Instead, would you use real-time chat (like that Java browser client for IRC), or threaded discussions, or a froup?
I probably wouldn't make much use of a book discussion forum, but I see the value of having a place to discuss LibraryThing itself, and how to use it/use it better.
Moof made some excellent points about the problems inherent in trying to constrain the topic of a discussion. I also think the idea of peer-review/moderation makes sense, as long as it doesn't slow down discussions or stop them happening in the first place.
gfvonb's suggestion of having a trackback-like feature to notify a book or author page when it's being discussed is also a great one. It might also make it easier to decide when to stop highlighting a discussion - just wait until x days have passed since the last trackback.
However, you may have an issue with distinguishing between a discussion in which a book was mentioned in passing, as opposed to one in which the book was the primary topic.
Tagged forums.. that's a cool idea - I wonder just how far you could take it? Sorry, I'm getting distracted ;)
I agree with everyone who's said that the discussions should never get in the way of the catalogue. I'm sure there must be some way to do it unobtrusively, selkie's idea of handling this in a similar way to the reviews icon seems like a good one.
I completely agree that threaded discussions are the root of evil. They are so hard to read and follow as new threads spawn, and you have to load so many more pages to keep up with a conversation... it's awful. So whatever you do, please keep it linear.
This is exactly what I was suggesting (but it probably wasn't entirely clear, since I left a word out... posting after AM):
"Why not have a sort of "trackback" feature, so that when a book or an author is linked to from the forums, a trackback link appears on the book/author page?"
andyl - In case you don't know, you can use an ISSN to add a journal, just as you'd use an ISBN to add a book. Of course, there's no way to indicate which issues you own--it's just one entry for the journal as a whole.
For recommendations, check out the way last.fm handles them. (Go to the page for any artist, album, or track and then click on the icon with the star in the upper right corner.) Nice 'n easy!
I've been mulling this over. I think it is more important to have a forum (or forums) about the LibraryThing site itself, rather than worry about book discussions. I don't have any particular objection to the latter, but they are very easy to find elsewhere. I'd like to have a place to discuss ideas, issues, problems with the site.
I do not want to scare away people who "just want to catalog their books."
I wouldn't worry tremendously about this. Those who want to use the forum will, and those who don't, won't. I'd be more concerned about a phenomenon I've seen elsewhere, where people with no particular involvement in the primary aspect of the site invade a forum and use it as sort of chat room.
Not to risk the wrath of Tim, but why does the forum have to be either threaded or unthreaded? I have seen forums that allow the user to decide whether to view the posts in a threaded or unthreaded manner. It seems to me that this would be harder to implement, but may please a greater number of users...
Rob Szarka,
Exactly, I've added a couple of copies of a magazine in already (with commentary for issue number etc) and it isn't really satisfactory as far as I am concerned.
I don't want to add 700+ entries for my magazines and journals (all manually) if I am going to get little value out of it.
How should it do periodicals? Make suggestions.
Serials cataloguing.
Firstly, I want to make it quite clear I am not a trained librarian.
Secondly, I see LibraryThing as quite a lightweight tool (and that is a compliment) and that it shouldn't try and reproduce the complexities of serials cataloguing that large libraries try and achieve.
Looking at what I (and others) have already entered - we have put the title plus the issue date and in some cases issue number in the title. Someone else has entered 85 issues as just one entry in LibraryThing.
For me personally - I would like to have the opportunity to following fields.
Issue Number, Volume Number, and Issue Date (and optionally Whole Number - although I don't mind using comments for that).
I cannot use the current date field for issue date as it isn't long enough to support dates such as November/December 1998 (or December 2001/January 2002) even with month abbreviations.
Issue Numbers are also sometimes complicated and so should be free text fields (probably about length 10).
Duplicates should only be highlighted on duplication of title, issue date, issue number.
The manual entry form should have some javascript magic (maybe a checkbox for serials) that will only show the extra fields where applicable.
Finally I'm still keen on contents cataloguing (for books as well as serials) but I know that will require at least one new table to handle with any efficiency and will require quite a bit of work including major changes to entry screens (maybe a collapsible DIV for the contents).
I remember someone else talking about serials cataloguing on a previous topic on this blog. It would be worth trying to find out what other people want from serials cataloguing as well as just me.
My gut instinct is that a single issue of a journal shouldn't "count" the same as a book, for purposes of recommendations and such. And IMHO the interface would quickly get cluttered if each issue were on a separate line.
I also noticed that, for the one journal I've entered, the ISSN didn't get cataloged (even though that's what I used to add it)--not in the ISBN field, not elsewhere. But I assume that data is in the record that you're accessng, somewhere? Is it possible for there to be an ISSN that is the same number as an ISBN, or could you always tell whether a given number is an ISSN or ISBN?
Perhaps you can adapt the current structure so that a single issue of a journal uses a single record, as books do now, but then look at the ISSN to know that the data for all the entries with that ISSN should be aggregated in recommendations and the non-periodical-specific parts of the interface.
Having said that, I'm not sure whether I'd take the time to tag each issue of a journal separately. It would really useful if I could see which authors or papers are in each issue ("Geez, I know that Becker article was in the AER somewhere"), but it's unlikely that I'd enter that data by hand. And, if that data isn't there for me to search, then just knowing which issues I own and should look for on my shelf instead of the library is the important part.
As an aside, I like that LT can be "lightwieght" if you want to use it that way, but that there's lots data in there (LOC #, etc.) for power users. Best of both worlds. :)
Rob Szarka said "It would really useful if I could see which authors or papers are in each issue"
Yep - that is what I really want to be able to do. Also what short stories are in what collection. I would also like to tag articles / short stories and comment on them just like I do with books.
The other problem with cataloguing a magazine as just one entry - is that I have a number of magazines for which I only have lots of short runs separated by gaps.
Finally if there is a flag for serial those can easily be ignored for recommendation purposes (I assume). Also there could possibly be a switch to include/exclude serials when displaying the catalogue and doing a search.
...which pops the top on a while 'nother can o' worms. Is LT extensible to include other media types, such as CDs, LPs, DVDs, etc.? Or would it collapse under its own weight at that point?
(If you do decide to tackle music, some sites to look at include rateyourmusic.com, musicbrainz.com, and last.fm. All three of them started out pretty half-a**ed, but have made improvements as they ran into their design flaws.)
A forum to report bugs in LibraryThing is surely needed. I've just tried to import a text file of ISBNs and had a) multiple entries created for individual ISBNs and b) 44 ISBN failures, even though the ISBNs exist in the online services.
A forum to suggest new features for LibraryThing would also be useful. Thanks
For book discussion ideas, look at how last.fm structures their discussions. It's a bit redundant in places (why have a group forum and a group "journal?") but they have a good method of tagging artists, songs, and albums and then linking to that discussion on the relevant pages. Their "recommended: reading" and "reply tracker" features are the BEST THING EVER for finding conversations you want to join and keep track of . . . this is the way Web 2.0 should work.
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