Some responses
I'm not making major changes this week, but just planning them. (I'm traveling on business.) But I thought I'd respond to some comments.
OCLC. I'll look into "find in a library" functionality. I see the attraction.
Tags. I don't think I'll split different sorts of tags. Tags should be absurdly easy to enter.
Peter. Shoot me your email again. I try to respond to everything, but some emails slip by. I am interested in your UI ideas.
Covers. Covers are determined by ISBN. What LibraryThing should do—I think—is list all the ISBNs and covers for a given "book." I'll add that when I add edition disambiguation.
Christian Science. Google it. It's a church—The Church of Christ, Scientist—started in Boston by Mary Baker Eddy. Among other things (and at the risk of speaking for another's religion) Eddy believed in faith healing—that illness was really spiritual. The newspaper is connected to the church, but the only concrete result from that is a daily column on Christian Science themes.
Thanks for all the positive comments. I'll be back making daily changes soon.
OCLC. I'll look into "find in a library" functionality. I see the attraction.
Tags. I don't think I'll split different sorts of tags. Tags should be absurdly easy to enter.
Peter. Shoot me your email again. I try to respond to everything, but some emails slip by. I am interested in your UI ideas.
Covers. Covers are determined by ISBN. What LibraryThing should do—I think—is list all the ISBNs and covers for a given "book." I'll add that when I add edition disambiguation.
Christian Science. Google it. It's a church—The Church of Christ, Scientist—started in Boston by Mary Baker Eddy. Among other things (and at the risk of speaking for another's religion) Eddy believed in faith healing—that illness was really spiritual. The newspaper is connected to the church, but the only concrete result from that is a daily column on Christian Science themes.
Thanks for all the positive comments. I'll be back making daily changes soon.
posted by Tim at 11:43 AM
78 Comments:
If you're still considering some sort of wish list functionality, you might be interested in this article from O'Reilly about problems with the Amazon Wish List.
COVERS.
Please Tim, also allow upload scanned covers. My Spanish books just don't show through LT search, and many obscure books with no ISBN neither.
I belong to the users interested in cataloging my books more than the social stuff. To me, seeing the covers of ALL my books is half the joy of using LT. It is that **important**.
Thanks
books4life
Yeah, scanned covers would be rockin'. Actually, maybe you could set it up so that you could select the cover you want to display from either your scan, the scans of others, and/or Amazon.
That's asking a lot, I know. :)
LibraryThing is the best invention in the world of computing since Al Gore came up with the Internet. Having spent many hours with it in the last few days, here are a few observations on small glitches and grand possibilities:
An ISBN search often seems to fail while a title-author search for the same title succeeds.
There are many cases in which an LC call number (for example) doesn't display in the corresponding LibraryThing field even though the call number data is present in the underlying MARC record. This is perhaps some kind of MARC-to-Z39.50 mismatch?
I'm wondering what happens when "Update as cataloging data improves" is checked? I'd guess all the library-supplied data is over-written, so if I have edited anything in the record it would be lost; in that case, when "update" is checked (which is most of the time) users would be advised to enter their own data only in the "Comments" field.
One feature I'd really like to see is a "replace this data with data from another catalog" feature. If I've created a record with Amazon data because it isn't cataloged elsewhere yet, it would be nice to be able to easily replace that with LC data when available. (As I understand it now, I'd have to either cut and paste everything, or just delete the record and create a new one; but perhaps I have this wrong.)
Another great display and comparison tool would be a histogram of LC call numbers represented in a collection: the X-axis would be letters A-Z, and for each class a Y-axis bar would show the number of books in the collection in that class. (An option to zoom in by letter could show QA, QB, QC, etc.)
"LibraryThing as Global Union Catalog." The really exciting prospect of LibraryThing is its potential to create a Global Union Catalog for small, special collections. While the fun/social value will always be present, the knowledge-value of LibraryThing will come not from knowing who has one of 800 copies of "The DaVinci Code," but from knowing who has one of the three worldwide copies of a rare volume, or the only known presentation copy from an obscure author, or a volume of special provenance with interesting marginalia. While individual collections will always be small, the aggregate has the potential to be something really great. ("Many small things make a pile," as Google is fond of saying.)
Along these lines, it would be wonderful to make LibraryThing itself a Z39.50 database that could be searched as a global OPAC. (LibraryThing members would have the option of having their data included or not.)
To make these global possibilities more practical, I think it would be great if some professional catalogers and systems librarians would offer a FAQ sheet for users, with suggestions regarding formats and controlled vocabularies for user-supplied data. If I want to regularly enter provenance data, for example, what would be the best way to do that consistently so that other people would be able to search it? Likewise, if would be terrific to have a "holdings" field for serials - I might have one of the few existing runs of an obscure periodical, and it would be beneficial to the community to be able to list holdings in a systematic way. (Obviously this could go to far - we don't need complete MARC equivalence; but a handful of special fields for custom use would be great. The ones that come to mind for me are provenance and holdings, but there are probably others.)
Tim has given the world a GreatThing. Thank you!
OCLC lookup would be divine! In many cases, I've found the book in question via OCLC but no library holds the exact version that I require. OCLC lookup would help tremendously, especially for those of us with access to it and simply want to plug the OCLC number in and get the exact info needed.
Many continued thanks for an excellent product!
Megan's comment made me think some more about the "book" vs. "book" distinction...
Right now, if I can't find the exact edition I own in a catalog, I pick the closest and tag the book "nae" for "not exact edition".
What I'd really like to do is add a generic copy of the "book", as in a specific title and author but not a specific ISBN/edition/etc.
That would also be a win for adding books I've read but don't own or want but don't own.
And I'll bet there are a lot of lazy--I mean, not as obsessed--people who would rather just catalog "books" in that sense than take the time to ferret out the specific edition they own. So, it might encourage more people to use the site.
Bob - Interesting comment about LT as a "Global Union Catalog". I, for one, would be interested in hearing more about this idea--what would we do with one?
Tim - Re: covers, they're not too important to me (though scanning them is an easy way to find a book in a list), but if you decide to allow uploads, last.fm is a good model for how to approve them, IMHO.
bob o'hara said: "I'm wondering what happens when 'Update as cataloging data improves' is checked? I'd guess all the library-supplied data is over-written, so if I have edited anything in the record it would be lost..."
Tim, I'd like to know the answer to this too, please. An ongoing (if mild) frustration for me involves the use of special characters in the transliteration of Tibetan titles and author names. Some of these characters don't carry across, rendering the names as gibberish. Furthermore, some of the entries have actual spelling errors in the Tibetan - probably transcription errors, I suspect.
I've been correcting some of the bibliographic information on my copies of these titles, and leaving the "update" option deselected for exactly this reason. Of course, this also means that I'm unlikely to get the cover image appearing some day... or am I wrong?
I'm with Rob and Megan on the "book" vs "book" thing. Especially for novels but also for certain types of nonfiction. Not so good for reference books where edition can be extremely important.
I use three tags here. "checked edition" means I had the book with me and used the ISBN or other info contained in the book itself to get the most accurate and specific data; "unchecked edition" which means I didn't have the book with me but the current data comes from a source with at least the same cover as mine so it's probably right; and "wrong edition" when even the cover looks different from mine.
For me, especially when adding books in the unchecked or wrong categories, it seems most useful to search LT itself rather first, only looking to external libraries when that fails. For books not even in my collection, even "adding" them seems superfluous when I just want to add reviews, ratings, and tags - which mostly belong to the "platonic book" rather than the "physical book". In these cases I just want to say what I think of these books and get the benefit of better suggestions from it.
Dear Tim,
I was amused to see the kind of attractive (it is) lettering you use for author cloud may be found on some Amazon book ads. One I saw today was for Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. There different colors for different size letters were used too.
Very pretty.
Chava
Dear Tim,
I was amused to see the kind of attractive (it is) lettering you use for author cloud may be found on some Amazon book ads. One I saw today was for Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. There different colors for different size letters were used too.
Very pretty.
Chava
Mad Magazine: "What, me worry?"
Older books need manual entry with no database support, e.g., "The Story of the Greatest Nations---From the Dawn of History to the Twentieth Century".
By Edward S. Ellis, A.M.
Charles F. Horne, M.S., Ph.D.
Published by Francis R. Niglutsch
New York
Copyright 1901-1903
Of course the above book has no LC No. or ISDN...no number at all.
Some of the fun of using LibraryThing is picking up a real old book and typing the sucker in.
In response to previous comments: When I deselect the update option while editing an entry and then submit the info, if I go back to edit again I find that the update option is again checked. Does this mean I can't uncheck it? Many of my entries are heavily edited since the edition we own is not in the available databases. I really don't want to lose this info.
So Tim, a third person awaiting your answer.
Anyway, I'm having great fun rediscovering my library.
Here's another small option that would be great:
I was testing the blog widget, which is really fun. I see that the links it generates always go to the "social" page for a given title. It would be nice to have a checkbox available when creating a blog widget that allows you to point it to either the social page or to the catalog card page - I fear that a lot of my entries are not going to be shared by many people for quite a while, and the blank social page is not very informative.
More ideas to come...
I've actually been shocked at some of the obscure stuff I've been able to match up with an exact or reasonably-close edition. E.g., How to use dual base slide rule xponential Ln-L scales and a 1928 math text.
Tim said: OCLC. I'll look into "find in a library" functionality. I see the attraction.
Way to go! I heard a lecture yesterday afternoon given by the OCLC vice president in charge of the Open WorldCat program. He's impressed by LibraryThing; mentioned it a couple of times. His talk outlined some areas in which OCLC is looking to expand its web services based on Open WorldCat. They seemed to me to complement what LibraryThing does. I'll write more about this if anyone's interested.
Tim, I don't know if this can be fixed or not but I have noticed that many of my "unique" books are not unique at all, they just have the title entered slightly differently. As an example, I found the following book by Eric Ambler listed on the author page as four different books:
The light of day
The Light of Day (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
The Light of the Day
Light of Day, The (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
I assume the owners of these books simply entered their data from four different libraries. If there were a way to use fuzzy logic (is that the right term?) to combine these nearly identical titles it would greatly improve the value of the social data.
Hi Tim,
I continue to be in love with Library Thing, and am incredibly flattered that you used my quote on the front page. However, it does make me a little crazy that you have a typo in there. Should be, "I have not been this excited about the Internet since I 'discovered' blogging" with either a period or an exclamation point - I'm good either way! - but not a question mark.
Sorry to quibble, I am truly honoured to be quoted.
could the blog widget include a random tagged option, as well as recent tagged? please and thank you...
I, too, am more interested in cataloging a book collection than the "social stuff." For a small working research library like ours, LC cataloguing is a critical tool. We have so many books (with many more yet to enter into LT! that it's hard to remember the book resources that are actually here when we're doing research. The truth is, when books enter the collection we don't always have time to fully explore the contents of the books. But LC cataloguers do take the time. And their consistent use of standardized cataloging language is awesome. I can never come close to that by using tags. Quality cataloging is the most time consuming of all the tasks involved in creating a library record--and it's one of the best added values LibraryThing can offer. Please bring back the full cataloging data.
LT is about to pass 1,000,000 books...
I have had two problems with authors names generated from ISBN entries.
1) when the last name is two or more unhyphenated words, e.g Le Guin, de Camp, del Rey, van Vogt, Nielsen Hayden. These normally end up with only the final part allocated to last name.
2) where the book has an editor rather than an author the entry often comes up as Matthew (Ed) Engel.
O.K. I have not entered and books by Patrick Nielsen (Ed) Hayden yet but they do exist.
Fields I would like to see for bokks include cover artist and copyright date/date of first publication. (I do see the difficulty of getting this information). I also have all my books numbered and would like to enter these and sort on them, but clearly this would require much more popular demand before you considered it.
Finally (for the moment) I would like to be able to access the contents list for anthologies and collections. Again there are questions of how, if there a demand.
For what I paid I am happy with what I've got. A backup of my own catalogue which I can access from any internet connected computer.
Ringman says: "When the last name is two or more unhyphenated words, e.g Le Guin, de Camp, del Rey, van Vogt, Nielsen Hayden. These normally end up with only the final part allocated to last name."
I've noticed a few similar ways of mangling names, especially "foreign ones". Languages such as Spanish and Russian often use a patronymic and matronymic rather than just a surname. English speakers often take the extra name as a middle name resulting in "Márquez, Gabriel García" rather than "García Márquez, Gabriel". This influences the way author "codes" are currently generated and I was able to find a few instances.
Similarish again, some other languages such as Hungarian and Japanese put the surname first and the given name last. Again I found a few cases with Japanese names, but none with Hungarian names - I couldn't think of many Hungarian authors.
It shouldn't be too hard to add checks for both of these in the code which looks for combine-able names.
Unfortunately there can be several different covers per ISBN. Publishers will change covers if there seems to be a good marketing reason. Case in point: Ballantine's mass market Lord of the Rings trilogy was given new covers to correspond to the movies.
trollsdotter
I see that there is a possibility for Spanish books and one comment is about Greek, Hungarian and Japanese. I am wondering if it is possible to search the Norwegian National Library database as well for Norwegian books if I start to use LibraryThing?
A very minor issue--wouldn't it make more sense to have the default ordering be by author's last name, rather than by title? The title ordering isn't even done in the standard way, for example "A Brief History of Time" will be listed under A rather than B. I remember the default ordering used to be by author, I wonder why this was changed.
And what about to make it happen to mark the original language and the language of the translation of a book in your private collection ?
Tim -
Any chance there will be a companion site "Music Library Thing"? I would love to have the exact same features for my CD collection. Your site is amazing. Nice work, and great UI.
do any of the searched libraries have the option to search by LoC Catalog Card Number? I've a number of books that are pre-ISBN but do have a LCCN---it'd be nice to be able to search by that instead.
Anandi, if you want to put your music collection online this site is pretty decent (though not as nice as LibraryThing):
http://rateyourmusic.com/
And here's one for DVDs:
http://www.dvdaficionado.com/
Congrats on reaching and surpassing the 1,000,000 book mark, LT!
How about 20 most obscure libraries on the Zeitgeist Page?
ringman and hippietrail talk about author names. In MS Outlook, when entering a contact name, you are given a choice (in a drop down list) for the order of the name - lastname, firstname or firstname, lastname. Something similar could be implemented for entering author name, though it sounds as if there would need to be several more choices presented.
Wow! More than ONE MILLION BOOKS!
Very Cool~
Congratulations, JoClare
I'd like to be able to buy permanent accounts for my friends for xmas, but as of now, I think I can only buy myself an account. Can you make a button to "buy this person an account"? It would probably bring in quite a bit of revenue.
Oops mysql_connect() too many connections.
I guess a better database connection cache is needed (one which you can set a ceiling on number of connections).
Either that or some exception handling for that error and then wait on a connection to be released back to the cache (which shouldn't take too long).
I'm not a PHP programmer so can't suggest anything specific.
I have come across more problems with the suposed uniqueness of an ISBN. Many of my books by Asimov are 1970's panther editions. eg Foundation 1973 ISBN 0586010807.
Panther were part of Granada publishing who may have been part of someone else. They subsequently became Grafton then Harper Collins. Looking up the ISBN on Amazon.co.uk gives a date of 1994 and publisher Collins as well as the wrong cover.
Ringman,
I get that a lot as well. I just correct the publisher and year line. I doubt that there is anything technical that can be done - although sometimes searching on other data sources does give earlier editions (but no photos - they always come from Amazon AFAIK).
Incidentally I have had similar problems with Tor UK/Pan Macmillan where some books had the incorrect publisher line. Note - Macmillan owns both imprints.
The worst case yet. by copy of the silver locusts 1977 was reissued in 1981 with the title the martian chronicles without an ISBN change.
In trying to identify the same book, I would suggest ignoring "The" or "A" at the start of the title, these often change between editions.
Let me echo what vscarlett said about LOC metadata. Even where I've tagged carefully to reflect my own perspective, knowing the LOC classification would be nice.
JesseM - I tend to want to group by authors, too, but many books have no single or known author. Where does, say, the Martin Luther translation of the Bible go in such a list, for example? Under "Martin Luther"? The name of the editor of the edition in question? "YHWH"? ;) Authors are tougher than titles to get "right", IMHO.
anonymous is, I take it, requesting dedicated fields for original and translated language? What do you do about a book in several languages, then? The Bible is, again, an example of a case that's problematic (but so is Blixa Bargeld's Headcleaner). We'd also need a standard thesaurus for it to be useful, I think. Tags are more flexible and work very well for my purposes.
anadi - Let me second JesseM's recommendation of RYM for cataloging music. No, it's not as good as LT, but it does also give you an option to export your data, so there's a good chance you'll be able to import it into "MusicThing" when Tim gets around to creating it. ;) But I've also noticed that quite a few "sound recordings" are findable right here on LT. (I just did a test for Back in Black and turned it up within three tries.)
About book covers, I too hate that we get the latest covers for so many classics; they're usually inferior to the old ones, IMHO. I don't see what we can do about it, though. Meanwhile, I often pull data from the Library of Congress to get a better match to the actual edition I own, but that means not having a cover. Since LT already "knows" when two database entries represent the same book (for some values of "book" and "know"), maybe it would be nice to go grab another cover of the same book when none is available for a given entry? Or would that be too confusing?
I just have to say that the number of duplicate or incorrect ISBNs I've encountered in cataloguing a fraction (maybe one fifth) of our library has shattered my view of ISBNs as unique identifiers.
A little part of me died when I realised how bad it is.. They represented a degree of order in the universe which, it turns out, does not exist.
Oh well, life goes on - I guess. ;)
Tim, thanks so much for LibraryThing! It's a fantastic resource. I do have one request -- would it be possible to tweak the alphabetizing to ignore initial articles (a, an, the) in title names? Most of my books right now are landing under "T" for "The", which keeps confusing the heck out of me until I realize (again) what's going on.
On book titles beginning with "the", "a", "an".
The first issue is whether two titles are the same. In this case I recommend (internally) normalizing the title so that those people who edit titles into the form of "Xyzzy, The" will still match everybody else's "The Xyzzy".
The second issue is the sorting, which would take advantage of the same normalization. It's very easy to implement, I did it once for an MP3 cataloguing script. MediaPlayer now does it also.
An overriding issue is making the feature extendible so that people who catalogue books in various languages are not overlooked. This could be done by us helping tim with a catalog of such words in various languages, or perhaps with a way for users to directly add to it, in much the way that we are now permitted to merge authors' names.
Thanks hippietrail for having spoken about foreign users.
Another problem for us non-english speakers is that LT doesn't obviously (yet?) recognize the various translations of one book, so, for example, it doesn't list me among the owners of "Oracle night" by Paul Auster just because my book is titled "La notte dell'oracolo" in italian.
By the way, the equivalent of A, AN, THE in italian are UN, UNO, UNA, IL, LA, LO (L') (singular), I, GLI (plural).
oh yes I know they are many! :-)
Tim -- Regarding retrieving sortable titles for LT; the MARC standard does support this to some degree. If you retrieve a title from a library via Z39.50 & MARC, you should be able to get this type of data. Feel free to contact me if you need the specifics. It involves character counts stuffed in a MARC title subfield.
Rick Brannan
LT User: supakoo
http://www.supakoo.com/rick/ricoblog
IMHO, for the purposes of this site, a book in English and the "same" book in Italian really are two different books. If anything, I'd go the other direction: two versions of the "same" book translated into the same language by two different translators should count as two different books.
I've been thinking about the issues with translations of the same book for a while since I collect translations from and into several languages.
An ideal system will have two levels and will be translation-aware. Most users won't care about this but some will be passionate.
On one level, Cien años de solidad and One Hundred Years of Solitude are the same book. On the other level, Alfred Birnbaum's and Jay Rubin's translations of Murakami's Norwegian Wood are two very different books.
But two translations of the same work into the same language is I guess a special case and will have to wait until such time as Librarything takes into account translators' names too.
But in the meantime it would be very very nice to have a way of indicating which works are translations of other works, including direction (which is the original?) As a default such would be treated as the same book but users would have a preference of a view setting to not treat translations as the same book.
I can see what both rob szarka and hippietrail are saying. "Oracle night" and "La notte dell'oracolo" are a) not the same book as a MATERIAL OBJECT (it's a bit like the issues with different editions of the same book) but b) the same book as WORK OF ART.
My idea was to create another field called "original title" or something. I felt the need for it since, as it is now, though I know it's not true, I apparently share very few books with other users, so for me the "social" aspect of LT is missing. I'm one of those who think that this social aspect is less important than cataloging so it may not damage me in particular, but all the same I still think it is a flaw in the system.
I agree with Hippietrail. I'd like to expand on Moloch's contrast of the book as "material object" vs. 'work of art'. In some cases the design and production of the material object is artful itself. In my own (old and outdated) private database, I had fields for press (as distinct from publisher), illustrator, book designer, jacket designer, size, binding and typeface. These categories are not notable for many books, but are very useful for some collectors.
Yes, but I didn't mean that the covers and the design of books aren't artful in some cases, I may not have chosen the right words.
I have a free account at present and today (December 6th) I tried to get a paid account and it wouldn't let me. Even though I filled everything out, it kept saying that information was missing. Is this a problem that's just come up?
am loving LT immensely, and am using our account as a family library catalogue. This is great, except to be able to sort/look up things using tags, well.. we now also have a lot of tags.
it's a small issue really, but would it be possible for the "most used tags" and "alphabetical tags" to be listed in tidy columns of one tag per column, instead of the paragraph style they're in now?
It would make it much simpler to scroll the page and select the tag one was looking for.
Keep up the good work!
some, like me, find the current style of tags display much better than a vertical one would be. I have many tags and use the display to check for misspellings,etc. Since I dislike scrolling, I want that to be a minimum and I want to see as many at one time as possible; thus, a vertical list would be less useful.
Well, wont be able to please all the people all the time...
pwh(hailelib)
Tim, a thought...
At the YOUR CATALOGUE, instead of having pages 1,2,3,etc. have it listed by alphabet a,b,c,d,etc.
I think most people looking for a book in their own catalogue are doing so by title, so the alphabet makes more sense.
Thanks.
grotto35
For me it would rather be better more than 50 books per page, I have less than 200 books, but think about the many users who have a library of 1,000+ !
Poor Tim is bombarded by requests!!!
At the risk of overwhelming Tim with enhancement requests (LibraryThing is great Tim, I love it!), I second the desire to be able to browse my library starting at a particular point. I sort my catalog by author and would like to be able to jump directly to the M's for instance without having to page through dozens of screens to get there.
And to make this really useful (hey, while we're asking, right?) it would be great if I could sort on two fields so my catalog could be arranged by title within author. I suppose this could be done by concatenating the fields before performing the sort.
Thank you Tim for all your efforts to make LibraryThing the best app on the web!
This is not a request for a new feature. In fact, it is a request that, rather than add new features, current ones that are broken be fixed.
Specifically, the "random books" widget and the "suggestions". A couple of us have mentioned here that the former has stopped appearing on our profile, and trying to generate the latter gives this error report: "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 35 bytes) in /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/profile_suggestions.php on line 325"
So I vote for fixing these things first, and then adding new stuff.
Moloch - Actually, what I'm saying is that the original text and the translation of that text are different even as "works of art". There's, of course, the issue that some folks will prefer one translation over another. (I have multiple translations of Szymborska, Rimbaud, Sun Tzu, Homer, etc. for just that reason.) But, also, for purposes of matching preferences, I will have more in common with someone who owns an English translation of The Idiot than with someone who owns the Russian version. So, it's important to keep the distinction, IMHO.
Also, re: not having a lot of matches with other folks, a quick look at "Zeitgeist" today tells us:
total books catalogued 1,066,294
unique books 446,854
I take that it that means that, on average, a given "unique book" is currently owned by about 2.4 people. So, it's not too surprising that books you have in common with a lot of other folks is the exception rather than the rule.
Another bug relating to non-English scripts and matching.
For the first time today I noticed another user listed as sharing one of my books in Japanese by Haruki Murakami. But on closer inspection it's not the same book at all, or even the same language. User wwilliam has "聽風的歌" in Chinese and I have "アフターダーク" in Japanese.
It seems to me that non-ASCII or at least non-latin characters are being totally ignored for some purposes.
Off subject here: Has anyone else received a message from con-man Frappr LibraryThing group member Hassan (mid South Atlantic flag but not in LibraryThing). He's offering me $1.800.000!!?
are you sure he isnt from nigeria?
:-)
wafflehouse
How are you guys going to spend your $1.8 MM? I'm planning on buying a few books first. Then . . . ;)
you can just keep clicking on the farthest numbered page in the shown range (Go to page 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... last): click on 7, then 14 (or whatever) -- gets you where you want to go pretty quickly.
Well, not so very quickly. After clicking on page 7, it only increments in threes, so the next "last" is page 10, then page 13, and so on. When you have 138 pages, it can be pretty slow!
A better solution, I think, would be a "Go to page ___" option. Then you can use the sort of your choice, be it author (my usual search choice), title, tag, etc. , and head for the approximate page,
Bug report.
Clicking on Janet Evanovitch on the z_books.php results in the following error.
Warning: extract() [function.extract]: First argument should be an array in /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/catalog_bottom.php on line 364
other authors seem fine (at least as far as not giving an error).
Albert Camus appears twice.
Clicking on Michael Chabon produces one title (which isn't shared) but the top 50 says 228 people own Chabon books (which seems about right). Other authors are similarly affected eg. Patrick O'Brian
Albert Camus appears twice.
The first Albert Camus (262) actually has Harold Bloom in its URL, who otherwise doesn't appear. The second (248) is the true Albert Camus.
The problem with Michael Chabon is that all the "author codes" in the URLs on the page are computed wrong. They generate such as "michaelchabon" whereas the true code would be "chabonmichael". In many cases both exist due to incorrect entry of author names by users and have already been merged. In other cases such as this there is no "reverse author code" or the two have not been suggested for merging due to the bug I mentioned in a previous post regarding chiefly Japanese and Hungarian names. I've merged Chabon now.
I'd like to second Anandi on the MusicThing idea. I don't want to rate my music or write reviews about stuff I have, I just want a catalog of what is there, including song titles and other details. Two things that I like most about LibraryThing besides the cataloging aspect: being able to see who else has what I have and to look at their catalogs for ideas of other things I should read. The same would apply to any MusicThing you might create. (oh please oh please oh please oh please!)
As a librarian, I am mildly amused at the conversations happening here about what should be cataloged and how it should be cataloged. Poor Tim is getting a glimpse into the heated debates that go on between catalogers around the world. I wonder how long it will take for LibraryThing users to re-create the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules? Personally, I am applying some standards to my catalog, but even those are nowhere near as strict as the AACR. It's not my full-time job, and that's what it would take to have perfect records of my meager collection.
anna, if you make an account at rateyourmusic.com you're free to leave the rating field of all the CDs you add blank, that's what I did with my collection.
I'm heartily in agreement that a MusicThing would be quite valuable, but I'm afraid Tim's brain may implode while trying to run both book and music cataloguing sites. Still...
I've checked out rateyourmusic.com, as suggested by jessem, but I found it lacking. For one thing, there are no track listings. Not very useful...
Does anyone else think Tim is in hiding? Would anyone blame him? ;)
On OCLC integration, BookBurro works for me and my local libraries. I wonder if personal libraries can be given OCLC IDs and we can create an InterLibraryThing Loan system.
papalazarou sugested a list of obscure libraries. While at first I thought this a good idea there would be problems preventing it just selecting non english language users. When I checkedagainst the rest of thetop fify, two had only one book in common with me. Only one of these libraries was obscure, the other was Brazilian so presumably in portugese, I recognised several authors in the cloud.
I have a question about the "Other authors" section. It has the instructions "First Last, separate with commas".
So I put the last name first and I separate it with a comma from the first name which I put last... or I separate each "other author" with a comma... or both... or?
For my Swedish copy of on the Road I added both translators this way:
Nyström, Jan; Wilson, Lars
Will that work? Is this field used for anything anyway?
i'm pretty sure this means "first name, then last name, and separate each other author with a comma." so what you should be doing is:
Jan Nyström, Lars Wilson
but i really don't know what this is used for, do they get tied into their own author pages?
-nperrin
Hmm. That would mean "Other authors" works differently to "Author" which says "Last, First" and definitely does expect "Nyström, Jan".
Also it means losing information in names with more than two parts such as "García Márquez, Gabriel" which the "Author" section allows and uses...
Any chance of setting up some sort of system to let us give Library Thing memberships as a gift for the holiday season? I know of several people who would love memberships.
actually, the "extras" tab has the option to give an account as a gift. it says it's been available since late november, but i haven't tried it out.
-nperrin
Thanks nperrin. I had tried that, but that link just goes to the same page
http://www.librarything.com/extras.php#
:( Only 12 days to Xmas.
hippietrail wrote:
Hmm. That would mean "Other authors" works differently to "Author" which says "Last, First" and definitely does expect "Nyström, Jan".
Presumably this is because they need commas to separate the multiple authors, so they can't also use them to separate last and first names like in the "Author" field.
Also it means losing information in names with more than two parts such as "García Márquez, Gabriel" which the "Author" section allows and uses...
I don't see why--just as "last, first" really means "last, first + middle names", I assume the "first last" really means "first + middle names then last", so you'd just write "Gabriel García Márquez" and the system will know that only the final name counts as the last name.
I echo comments about finding this useful to catalog my collection than the social features. It's fabulous! And as New englanders say - Wicked fun! I am also interested in a place to have 'holdings' information for periodicals. (The current comments section will suffice though). Also, interested in 'check out' features, so I know which of my friends have which books. A more sophisticated way to enter the contents of a book would be nice. I intend to catalog a lot of pattern books, and I'm interested in indexing the patterns within the books. This is a great thing!
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Post a Comment
<< Home