One dozen million books
This weekend LibraryThing members added our 12 millionth book, mere weeks after crossing 11 million and less than two months after breaking 10 million. As Tim likes to point out, if LibraryThing were a "real library" it would, according to the ALA Fact Sheet, be the 4th largest in the United States*, right ahead of Yale and gaining on the Boston Public Library.**
Whereas physical libraries become more difficult to navigate as they increase in size, digital collections actually become easier to use, and their data more meaningful, as they grow. As David Weinberger says in Everything is Miscellaneous*** the answer to too much information is more information. And with an every-growing amount of data available to us, more and more interesting and useful patterns should continue to emerge.
* If "real libraries" stocked 7,776 copies of The Great Gatsby!
**At this rate, we'll be in second place by summer. The LC, with over 30 million volumes, will take a while to catch. But it'll happen.
*** If LT has a patron saint, it's Weinberger. I was skeptical, until Tim leant me his ARC copy of Everything is Miscellaneous. It's fantastic.
Whereas physical libraries become more difficult to navigate as they increase in size, digital collections actually become easier to use, and their data more meaningful, as they grow. As David Weinberger says in Everything is Miscellaneous*** the answer to too much information is more information. And with an every-growing amount of data available to us, more and more interesting and useful patterns should continue to emerge.
* If "real libraries" stocked 7,776 copies of The Great Gatsby!
**At this rate, we'll be in second place by summer. The LC, with over 30 million volumes, will take a while to catch. But it'll happen.
*** If LT has a patron saint, it's Weinberger. I was skeptical, until Tim leant me his ARC copy of Everything is Miscellaneous. It's fantastic.
Labels: everything is miscellaneous, milestones
posted by john at 12:19 PM
14 Comments:
The other snag with the 4th largest libray in the United states is that many of the books are not in the US!
Congratulations LibraryThing on the 12 millionth book. In a way, I agree with Ringman, LibraryThing is truly international.
Perhaps you should try for world domination! ;-)
- Geophile
P.S. Here's another use for LibraryThing, as my daughters have learned (one of them the hard way) -- check LibraryThing before buying birthday gifts.
Anyone need an extra copy of "The Complete Guide to Prehistoric Life" ;-) (just kidding -- I've found a loving home for it)
It would be interesting to see some charts of how LT has grown so far.
Congratulations on hitting 12 million. Watching LibraryThing grow is oddly satisfying!
Here's what I wish it could do for me...given a pile tagged TBR, sort them for me based on their LT ratings. I know I'm lazy and could look them up individually, but the list was so much smaller before I joined LibraryThing!
Thanks,
readaholic12
Quote Geophile: "Perhaps you should try for world domination! ;-) "
It is more like WORD domination.
If there is one thing that the world needs more of now, it is, knowledge.
Not to be a pain or rain on anyone's parade, but isn't that first footnote--the one about how there are 7776 copies of The Great Gatsby--kind of the point? To compare LibraryThing to a "real library" in my mind misses the point of what real libraries (and LT) are all about. (It's also why having a list of large libraries by volumes and then including both public library systems and academic libraries seems a bit silly.) What makes LibraryThing cool is that it's a series of individuals' collections, so of course there's a lot of overlap. The added value comes from the tags and connections we all put in the system. In contrast, the value of an academic library is the breadth of information that's contained within the volumes, not within the user data. As patrons, we're not even allowed to see user data at "real" libraries.
Yeah, I mostly agree with you. There are a lot of ways that LibraryThing differs from a "real" library—duplication, ability to take out books, etc. I think John hit the nail on the head, though, when he made the point about LibraryThing's more information deepening the information.
In comparing LibraryThing with real libraries two points *do* seem salient:
1. The data problems are the same. Library systems do more in some ways (eg., a full "integrated library system" orders books and receives them and etc.). But LibraryThing does more, and has a dynamism they don't have. All told, LibraryThing runs one of the largest book-based systems in the world for a fraction of the money a small New England college pays their ILS vendor. That's interesting.
2. There is power in regular people. A moment's thought will reveal that regular people's shelves hold many times as many books as all the libraries in the world. Until LibraryThing there was no possible way for that information to "do" anything. Now, the "hidden library" is visible, and that's interesting.
TIm
>But LibraryThing does more
was supposed to be something like "But LibraryThing does more in other ways"
Please tell me more about getting a CueCat scanner or some similar thing so I can join and upload my hundreds of books. I cannot find any scanner or CueCat scanner using your search function, but read that you have such a thing in a magazine article about LibraryThing.com
Please tell me more about getting a CueCat scanner...
Check out the "tools" tab for CueCat info.
Well, Tim (or anyone), just how many different titles or works are there in LibraryThing? Can you crank the stats and let us know?
I've suspected before that the big numbers were 'number of individual copies or items' and not 'number of different titles.' Hey, I'd even be happy to count different editions of Gatsby as different works. Count all the Gatsbies as the same work, or count the different editions as different works. Either way, it'll cut the number of "books" down to a more 'real' number.
Inquiring minds want to know!
--Melanchthon
>Well, Tim (or anyone), just how many different titles or works are there in LibraryThing? Can you crank the stats and let us know?
The unqiue works are on the Zeitgeist—1,830,617. But, as you point out, all the editions of Gatsby (or for that matter the Iliad) are just one work.
There are 2,182,456 unique ISBNs. Let's call those ISBN titles. 1,555,268 books don't have ISBNs, 12.78% of the total (1,2162,059). So, assuming edition variance is about the same between ISBN and non-ISBN books, we have some 2,461,374 total titles.
Libraries, of course, do carry duplicate titles, if never thousands of them. And "volumes" counts multiple times things that often have a single MARC record—and so LibraryThing record. The smallest library on the ALA top-100 has 2,715,986 volumes. Duplicates and volumes from multi-volume sets come to 10% of a their holdings, LibraryThing has about as many titles as the 100th largest library in the US.
Math is fun. But, as said, I don't want to make broad comparisons with libraries. Saying LibraryThing is a library is like saying MySpace is a very large block party. You can't hug someone on MySpace, or steal their wallet. You can't borrow a book from LibraryThing. And there are not carrels to sit at or, as was my wont in grad school, fall asleep at.
Incidentally, we actually track "titles" in the literal sense. There are 3,631,229 of them, accounting for all the different titles applied to those X-thousand Harry Potters.
I use LibraryThing in conjunction with my local library. I get suggestions (and unsuggestions) from LT then go to the library and get them from Inter-Library Loan. Several of the librarians, along with the peoplke at my local bookstore, have expressed interset in using LT for their collections.
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