Four improvements
Searching someone else's library. You can once again search someone else's library or tags from their catalog. You can do this with your own too. The search itself is still sub-optimal (eg., not indexing 3-letter words). That's next up.
See more now the default. Some users discovered that if you clicked "see more" you'd get more information and buttons within your catalog, including the number of users per book and a delete button. But most never users never played with it, and missed out. I decided to remove the button and turn the feature on all the time. I think it's better. It's simpler and seeing at a glance how many user have one of your books is just plain fun. As for the delete, that'll cut an hour off my weekly email load...
To make an omlette, you have to break some eggs. I got rid of the
icon, which indicated when you had reviewed a book. It added clutter without much funtionality. To check what books you've reviewed, go to the profile and see your reviews page.
Widget now shows random books for tags. A user asked for it, and I like to please. You can now make a widget that shows a random book, but only within a given tag.
Related tags improved. I changed how related tags are computed and ordered. The old way surfaced too many popular tags, like fiction and read at the expense of less common but more juicy ones. Take the tag vampires. The old system kicked off with the unhelpful fiction and fantasy tags, and includes others like romance and read high up. The new way exposes the pale white neck of tagging: vampire, horror, anita blake and buffy. Check out the difference between the old and new science tag.
See more now the default. Some users discovered that if you clicked "see more" you'd get more information and buttons within your catalog, including the number of users per book and a delete button. But most never users never played with it, and missed out. I decided to remove the button and turn the feature on all the time. I think it's better. It's simpler and seeing at a glance how many user have one of your books is just plain fun. As for the delete, that'll cut an hour off my weekly email load...To make an omlette, you have to break some eggs. I got rid of the
icon, which indicated when you had reviewed a book. It added clutter without much funtionality. To check what books you've reviewed, go to the profile and see your reviews page.Widget now shows random books for tags. A user asked for it, and I like to please. You can now make a widget that shows a random book, but only within a given tag.
Related tags improved. I changed how related tags are computed and ordered. The old way surfaced too many popular tags, like fiction and read at the expense of less common but more juicy ones. Take the tag vampires. The old system kicked off with the unhelpful fiction and fantasy tags, and includes others like romance and read high up. The new way exposes the pale white neck of tagging: vampire, horror, anita blake and buffy. Check out the difference between the old and new science tag.
posted by Tim at 1:57 AM
15 Comments:
Hooray for the four improvements. Much rejoicing will follow.
Somewhere down among the 80+ comments on an earlier post was another tag-related idea: how about a "call number cloud" to go along with the author and tag clouds? For those of us who really hope to get LC call numbers for most of our books, this would be great, and it would be a fine window into a collection. (It could perhaps be based on the initial letter(s) only, and would probably require a little script to see if the main class was one or two letters - QH as opposed to just Q.)
In this context, we were also wondering about the "automatically update record when cataloging improves," but that option seems to be gone now, yes? The fear was, if I revise one of the fields in a record or put data into an empty field, will my revision/addition get wiped out upon auto-update.
I'm afraid the 'random books from my collection' widget still doesn't work in Profiles: is it not intended to any more?
The widgets still don't work on my profile. Please, please, please, would you try to figure out why some of us are having that problem and fix it? Pretty please with sugar on top?
Interesting. I'm going to improve the recommendations soon anyway to get rid of duplicates (which is one possible reason here) and go at it from another. I did a little poking around. Do you have an example book that suggests it?
thanks for the random update, random tagged history is more fun than the most recent 4 kids books I put in.
i swear to god, i will buy a paid account as soon as it's possible to search for two or more tags. until then my library's not really functional for me.
Actually, the tags aren't stored as comma-delimited text field. They're a gigantic table with 1.6 million records. It's all quite quick, actually; MySQL is great, and computers are just so damn powerful these days. Indeed, it's not going to be that difficult for me to add complex searches for tags (eg., +history -india). Partial-tag searches are also easy but more "expensive" computationally.
The trick is the catalog searching. MySQL has a "fulltext" search, but it changed between versions (I'm stuck a version back), and there are some settings file changes I've never played with too. I also need to expand the number of fields in the search and force it to index two and three-letter words. With 1.1 million books in a 400MB database, I'm afraid all the indexing will require me to take the site down for a long night.
So, can you tell I'm avoiding the issue this week? :)
I would also like to be able to search by missing tags. For example when I think of a new "set" of tags such as "hardback" and "paperback", I want to see all the books I haven't tagged either way to find the last few. A search for just "-hardback -paperback" would do it.
I seem to need this all the time.
(I wonder if there would be any benefit at all to making LT aware of which tags are in mutually-exclusive sets?)
More stray thought on LC call numbers... (Tim will be glad when he has a forum going for LibraryThing, so people can post stray throughts there instead of in his blog. ;-)
Two classes of problems arise in using LC call numbers in LibraryThing. The first populating LibraryThing's LC call number field from the data in the underlying MARC record. LT appears to draw this information from the 050 field. (Perhaps this is part of the Z39.50 protocol; I'm not enough of a library geek to know.) The 050 field is often missing, however, but call number information may still appear elsewhere, most often in 090 ("local call number") or 852 ("location").
The second class of problems relate to machine sorting. Even the LC itself seems to be inconsistent in how the call numbers are spaced in the underlying MARC records. We can get B163.A24 sometimes, and B163 .A24 other times. But the greater problem is sorting on the main alphanumeric class. By LC sorting rules, this should be the correct order:
B167 .A24
B238 .D34
B1678 .B3
But the machine-sort in LT will generate:
B167 .A24
B1678 .B3
B238 .D34
It's not as simple a problem to deal with as it might seem, because the rules alternate between treating the main class as a number, but treating the cutter (the part after the ".") as a decimal. Adding a space after the alphabetic part of the main class would solve most of the problems I think:
B 167 .A24
B 238 .D34
B 1678 .B3
Well, Real Librarians have surely thought a lot about this; there must be automated sorting routines that have been written already to handle these problems.
The new related tags implementation is a godsend. :) Thanks!
The random books feature has disappeared from my profile too :-(
*ahem*
My post is titled, "A Lone Dissenting Voice"
I loved the icon indicating which books were already Reviewed so I could go back and review the others.
And yes, I do plan to review every damn book (that I remember enough of) in my catalog! How else to add real value to the bare star-counts of the recommendations? Reviews, people, reviews -- to the barricades!
(Sorry. Is it Christmas break yet?)
You can now make a widget that shows a random book, but only within a given tag.
Er, how do I do this? I don't see the option on the widget form.
And also, is there any way I could get the widget to display more info on my blog? I'd love to be able to have the book titles appear with the contents of the "Comment" field for a little one line review.
Rob. You don't see a "recent tagged" and a "random tagged"? It's the latter. If you don't see it, I'm guessing it's because you don't use tags. The options aren't there unless you do.
I don't know about the comments idea. Most people don't use comments that way, unfortunately. I could do reviews, but most people also write long reviews. Any other fields you'd settle for?
Albert Einsten said: "Keep everything as simple as possible, but not simplier"
Those numbers, below the icons,
instantly show how many librarys have the same book.
That is SIMPLE genius work!
Thank you LibraryThing
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