Norway, Sweden and New Zealand!
We've gone and released eleven Norwegian, Swedish and New Zealand libraries.Norway gets its first libraries, six in number, as does New Zealand, five. Sweden now has five, up from three. Of course, Norway and Sweden have their own, translated LibraryThings, no.LibraryThing.com and se.LibraryThing.com.
The libraries include The Royal Library of Sweden (LIBRIS), the Oslo Public Library (Deichmanske Bibliotek), the University of Auckland and the National Library of New Zealand. The new batch comes on top of twenty-five Danish and twenty-eight new Australian libraries, raising the new total to 132. Momentum is building. We'll release Finland next week, but just wait until we release new libraries from the USA, Canada and the Spanish-speaking world!
Getting people outside the US to join LibraryThing is all about making it easy for them to enter their books; this should make it a lot easier for Norwegians, Swedes and Kiwis to join the fun.
New features, Monday. We had planned to release some major improvments to book editing and cataloging quality today but at 5:30am last night Chris and I called it a night, frustrated with some Internet Explorer bugs. (Chris is still asleep. I got up at 9. Which one of us has a child, I wonder?) The screen-capture was taken at 3:30 from our video chat. Don't you wish you worked for LibraryThing?Anyway, I don't like to release really major features late in the week. And we can improve things. So we're going to pile on some more goodness and release everything Sunday night/Monday morning.
Downtime. We're going to go down for much of Saturday morning, changing the database in important ways.
Labels: new libraries, new zealand, norway, sweden
posted by Tim at 12:37 PM
15 Comments:
So what about the new (or reimplemented) British libraries Tim? You have tempted us with the British Library often enough in the past month.
"We've gone and released eleven Norwegian, Swedish and New Zealand libraries."
Okay, I got excited when I read that you were releasing elven libraries. I've always wanted to peruse the books at Rivendell and Minas Tirith. Unfortunately, it was simply my bad eyesight playing tricks on me. Alas, no 'Silmarillion' in the original Quenya.
The eleven libraries is great news, though. Good work, LibraryThing.
Thanks for the warning on Saturday downtime. Here is hoping the transition goes easily for all.
Why not release features late in the week? More specifically, why release late Sunday/early Monday when people are just about to be busy working for the week? I always find this frustrating, as I want to try out the new stuff, especially if it's cataloguing improvements, and I find it's gone live just as I'm about to go to work on Monday morning.
nperrin, I suspect either it's (a) they want to be able to quickly fix or revert launches of new features if something is broken, so they don't want to do it at the end of the workweek, or (b) your use is atypical, and traffic is highest during the workday, or both. Scheduling downtime for a weekend suggests to me that the traffic-pattern issue is at least partially responsible, since if weekends were peak time they'd be unlikely to have scheduled downtime then.
Thanks for the warning! Though what I will do with my Saturday morning, I don't know. ;-))
I'm looking forward to the new features, and I'd rather you got some sleep and did them right, than do them fast.
Don't you wish you worked for LibraryThing?
Actually...yes, I do. Need another librarian/archivist? I'm graduating from the University of Michigan's School of Information this April...
*wink wink nudge nudge*
:-D
Oh, brilliant. i have a whole hobby library of books, some of which are catalogued by the National Library, none of which are held anywhere else. I guess i now have a summer project to fianlly add them to library thing.
Thanks heaps!
(and I had to open IE to comment here - the image verification wasn't working with firefox and my ImglikeOpera extension for some reason. Silly Blogger)
nperrin: "Why not release features late in the week?"
I've been a carefuly watcher of blog ecology for more than two years now. If you release something Thursday, it reaches fewer people and it doesn't "make it 'round" the weekend. Monday may be when people work; it's also when people visit LibraryThing.
I hope our competitors don't see this; they're always releasing features on Fridays. Fridays is when the Bush (and before him, Clinton) administrations release their bad news. There's a reason for that.
This is great news! But when things start to get perfect, my eyes open up to more detailed problems: To list of things that cannot be translated, we can add library names. In the Swedish language version of LibraryThing, it would be nice to see the Swedish names of libraries.
The Royal Library of Sweden = Kungliga biblioteket
Royal Institute of Technology = Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan
Göteborg University = Göteborgs universitet
As with all translated terms on LibraryThing, the starting point should be the English names.
why aren't you twittering anymore? :)
Library name translations is an interesting one. You'll notice our names are a mixture of English and the language of the library. We chose them not entirely at random. Some things have form that most people who need to recognize, will. But it's not perfect, as you point out. Opening it to translation, however, could get very hairy insofar as so many are the same damn thing (eg., The Royal Library). And in English, for example, one does not say "State Museum" but the Rijksmuseum; and I don't feel that Yale University or Oxford need to be translated into every language in LT.
Not easy.
Yeah, I just found it irritating. I need to take it off. I have enough twittering in my head, and I frankly don't care what anyone else is doing all day long like that, with the possible exception of Abby, Casey and Chris.
Yay! More Swedish libraries! But also, you have fixed the LIBRIS thingie (excellent technical term!) that gave me loads error messages or "page not found", haven't you? :)
A bit off the topic but I was puzzled why the LT search does not include the option to search members libraries for a particular book -- there is a line in one i love and got translated in japanese but which is not with me now and i hoped to find someone with it to ask for the line if they had time to find it for me -- or is that why such a search is not there: so we do not bug each other that way?
keigu, there is - if you search for the book on the "Search" tab under "works" you can find it, and on it's details page you'll see the owners. If they have comments enabled on their profile page you can send them a message.
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