LibraryThing now the 100th largest library
See end for updates.
LibraryThing has reached its 2,634,375th book! While 2,634,375 doesn't look special, it is in fact one more than the American Library Associations's 100th largest library. In dethroning the Kent State system, LibraryThing steps into place as the new 100th largest library in the United States.
Okay, the ALA probably won't add us to their list. And, okay, LibraryThing isn't really a library in that sense. (It's more like the library consortium OCLC—if OCLC were in Lilliput.) But the milestone is pretty cool nevertheless. In nine months, LibraryThing has gone from zero to 2.6 million books. At this rate, we'll hit the top 30 by the end of the year, and there's no reason to believe LibraryThing won't top the Library of Congress' 29 million volumes some day.
Of course, everyone knows that private collections must dwarf library ones, but it's cool to see that demonstrated. Regular people have a lot of books. First-time visitors often fixate on the number of Harry Potters in LibraryThing (almost 20,000). But the "long tail" goes very far out. I once regarded Engel's Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army as a sort of private possession—I only ever met a handful of people who'd read it, and I studied Greek history. Now I have 10 other people to talk to. (Trust me: the title's boring, but it's groundbreaking stuff.)
Incidentally, the 2,634,375th book was Gaugin's Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal (Dover, 1985), added by the Boston-based sionnac, a hard-core (1,165-volume) bibliophile in Boston. Whoever the heck you are, LibraryThing owes you a beer! I'm down to Boston all the time, and Abby even lives there. Take a picture of yourself with the book. I'll post it up here.
Now does anyone know somebody at the ALA?
BTW: Steady yourself. The next week or so is going to be a merciless barrage of announcements and analysis of announcements. I have blog entries stacked up like cordwood here, just waiting to go. Some of you may have seen LC subjects tiptoe back in unannounced. There's a lot more there.
Update: Please note, talk of "dethroning" Kent State is tongue-in-cheek. I am not asserting that LibraryThing is better than Kent State's library. I'm not even asserting LibraryThing really is a library—you can't visit, after all, and you certainly can't take out books! (As Google would say "yet.") But I draw the line at the idea that LibraryThing and its libraries are all "arbitrary" and inferior to "actual" libraries. On the contrary, many LibraryThing libraries are assembled deliberately and with the sort of domain knowledge institutional libraries cannot match. For a rather heated discussion of this, check out LibraryTavern's comments.
Update to update: I was WONDERING why nobody left comments, and now I know. Blogger was throwing the comments elsewhere on my server. So you could see them if you clicked "comments," but they didn't show up on the main page. (My mistake, ultimately.) So, apologies to the commenters—you must have thought I was dissing you. The conversation is now a bit involuted, as Lycanthropist and I mostly debated over on LibraryTavern.
LibraryThing has reached its 2,634,375th book! While 2,634,375 doesn't look special, it is in fact one more than the American Library Associations's 100th largest library. In dethroning the Kent State system, LibraryThing steps into place as the new 100th largest library in the United States.
Okay, the ALA probably won't add us to their list. And, okay, LibraryThing isn't really a library in that sense. (It's more like the library consortium OCLC—if OCLC were in Lilliput.) But the milestone is pretty cool nevertheless. In nine months, LibraryThing has gone from zero to 2.6 million books. At this rate, we'll hit the top 30 by the end of the year, and there's no reason to believe LibraryThing won't top the Library of Congress' 29 million volumes some day.
Of course, everyone knows that private collections must dwarf library ones, but it's cool to see that demonstrated. Regular people have a lot of books. First-time visitors often fixate on the number of Harry Potters in LibraryThing (almost 20,000). But the "long tail" goes very far out. I once regarded Engel's Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army as a sort of private possession—I only ever met a handful of people who'd read it, and I studied Greek history. Now I have 10 other people to talk to. (Trust me: the title's boring, but it's groundbreaking stuff.)
Incidentally, the 2,634,375th book was Gaugin's Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal (Dover, 1985), added by the Boston-based sionnac, a hard-core (1,165-volume) bibliophile in Boston. Whoever the heck you are, LibraryThing owes you a beer! I'm down to Boston all the time, and Abby even lives there. Take a picture of yourself with the book. I'll post it up here.
Now does anyone know somebody at the ALA?
BTW: Steady yourself. The next week or so is going to be a merciless barrage of announcements and analysis of announcements. I have blog entries stacked up like cordwood here, just waiting to go. Some of you may have seen LC subjects tiptoe back in unannounced. There's a lot more there.
Update: Please note, talk of "dethroning" Kent State is tongue-in-cheek. I am not asserting that LibraryThing is better than Kent State's library. I'm not even asserting LibraryThing really is a library—you can't visit, after all, and you certainly can't take out books! (As Google would say "yet.") But I draw the line at the idea that LibraryThing and its libraries are all "arbitrary" and inferior to "actual" libraries. On the contrary, many LibraryThing libraries are assembled deliberately and with the sort of domain knowledge institutional libraries cannot match. For a rather heated discussion of this, check out LibraryTavern's comments.
Update to update: I was WONDERING why nobody left comments, and now I know. Blogger was throwing the comments elsewhere on my server. So you could see them if you clicked "comments," but they didn't show up on the main page. (My mistake, ultimately.) So, apologies to the commenters—you must have thought I was dissing you. The conversation is now a bit involuted, as Lycanthropist and I mostly debated over on LibraryTavern.
posted by Tim at 12:22 AM
10 Comments:
I laughed out loud when I read your reference to Engel's book. I haven't put my copy up yet (although I will as soon as I type this), but I have to say I'm surprised that so many Thingamabrians have it.
As much as for the subject matter, I bought it because Engels was probably my favorite -- and undoubtedly the strangest -- of my history professors. Thinking back to his classes, and the "No Whining" button he always wore at the time, always makes me chuckle.
Sure, I've been an ALA member since 1970 with a few breaks here and there. My question, can I barcode my books into your fabulous system? Joy Chase
Congratulations LT!!
lycanthropist can be archaicly negative all he wants - what we have here is a NEW kind of library whether he likes it or not! A modern librarything of the new millenium!
Tim, I guess seeing you have blog entries up the wazoo you won't have time to consider putting 'unread' as a category on the rating drop down menu...*giggles*
A real librarian should recognize immediately what LibraryThing is: it is a union catalog of personal collections. The National Union Catalog, or any other union catalog, contains hundreds of copies of common titles; every librarian should recognize that. Indeed, that's the giveaway that LT is a union catalog, rather than even the catalog of a library system, which might have ten or fifteen or twenty copies of common titles.
From a scholarly/professional point of view (without regard for the social virtues of LT, which are great in themselves), the value of LT is precisely the value of every union catalog: it allows people to discover more about authors, titles, works, series, publishers, and subjects than is possible within an individual library. There are plenty of people on LT already who have shown themselves to be collectors of a high order, and who are able to devote more time to acquisition and bibliographic description than any institutional library. As a modest example, my own collection of residential college histories is probably the largest of its kind in the world (at a whopping 72 volumes), and many of them I am sure are not available in the United States outside of my own bookshelf. No LC subject heading exists for these works, no printed bibliography, and apart from this listing on LT and on one of my own webpages, no researcher could learn about them without duplicating a lot of effort that I've already expended. Would any institutional library expend this effort? I doubt it -- they would depend on a collector like me to do the work, and maybe someday to donate the collection I have assembled. (Which I might or might not do, depending on whether the institutional library was nice to me.)
Yes, LT has no authority control to speak of yet. How long has LT been around? About six months. Seems to me the Library of Congress took a bit longer than that to develop authority control. And authority control has already been a subject of considerable discussion in the Google group, with a number of innovative proposals made to address it. And LT's "works" system is the foundation of an authority control system with capabilities that exceed any now in use by institutional libraries; it just needs to be linked into existing, more static, authority files.
And as for spotty representation in some areas: I used to work in an institutional library of a quarter million volumes, and you know, it didn't have a single novel. (It was one of the best science libraries in the world.) A union catalog like LT reflects the strengths of the individual libraries that make it up; it doesn't pretend to be like the catalog of a small-town public library, with one or two books about lots of different things, and lots of books about next to nothing.
And as for bad catalog copy: I agree! Somebody really needs to teach those folks at the Library of Congress to follow AACR2 for heaven's sake! Such inconsistency in formatting, abbreviations, dates, punctuation ... it's unbelievable! I have to go through and regularize all the Library of Congress data just to generate a simple date-sort of my books! And don't get me started on how inconsistent call number formatting is! I think I'm going to have to fire off a letter to my congressman today -- what are they wasting my tax dollars on down there in Washington anyway. They can't even learn to type abbreviations consistently....
;-)
rjo: marvelous! Thank you for a fabulous answer.
I wish you joy of your congressman! ;)
Ladymink: It's on my list. Frankly VERY few people are using that date, so it's not at the top. Sorry :)
Joyjoy: By barcodes you mean UPC barcodes? LT can't handle the barcoding--but press them to your computer monitor to make sure :) But if you get a barcode reader, it can handle the UPCs.
BDShepherd; Oh, excellent. Thanks for sharing. I wish I had had him.
Matt: I'm not going to go to the mat on that one, but it is interesting to compare the OCLC's top 1000 (Google it; a fascinating list) with the LT top 1000. The OCLC #1 isn't owned by a SINGLE LT user! (It's a Census document.)
Working link to rjo's residential college histories ;)
100th largest library in United States? Not if you're counting my books it can't be, they're nowhere near the US... is this another "world series" in the making?
Andrew aka " Scotsguyinwales"
LibraryThing you could be a library!! How many of you out there would be willing to lend your books?
LibraryThing is a "blog of note" today (this week?!) I see...how wonderful. Congratulations on the good work.
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