BookSense Events!
We just added over six-hundred and fifty events to LibraryThing Local, LibraryThing's portal for local bookstores, libraries and events.The events come direct from our friends at BookSense, the nationwide organization of over 1,200 independent bookstores. They made their complete events calendar available to us, and we were only to happy to add all the events we didn't already know about.
BookSense is the best; if you have a favorite local bookstore, chances are they're a BookSense store.* BookSense also gets the best authors. Upcoming events include David Sedaris at Vroman's in Pasadena and Salman Rushdie at Vroman's and at Caucer's in Santa Barbara. Of course, as happens with distributed data collection, not every BookSense store has their events in the feed. And some events had already been added by members. Be the total gain is some 660 upcoming events—a big leap. We'll be updating from th BookSense feed periodically from now on, which should take some of the data-entry load off of dedicated LibraryThing members.
So, thanks to the people at BookSense for working with us on this, and happy event-attending to the rest of us.
PS: There's a short article about this in the ABA's Bookselling this Week by David Grogan.
*My favorites—Books, Etc., Longfellow Books and the Harvard Coop—are all BookSense stores. My wife spent much of her 20s working at another, Bookline Booksmith, together with her best friend, who went on to work at Booksense. So, I've wanted LibraryThing to do something BookSense since we started.
Labels: authors, booksense, librarything local, new feature
posted by Tim at 10:06 AM
6 Comments:
Very nice! This does, however, explain the odd appearance of a quilting event (it was held at a bookstore, but had nothing, apparently, do to with any book)!
This is great news! I've been hoping you could do something like this with Booksense since LT Local first came up.
Tim -
I've just noticed a couple of issues with the Booksense additions.
Take a look at this page. Every "event webpage" link for items added by Booksense is bad, and you'll also see that for a couple of the descriptions, the authors are listed with their names in lowercase, last name first (and both names run together).
Compare, on this author page the difference between the entry added by Booksense and that added by Bookjones (and the bad seems to have pushed out the good).
This also reveals another issue. Bookjones listed the event under 57th Street Books because that's where it's being held. 57th Street Books is run by Seminary Co-op, and all the event listings are on Seminary's website (57th Street has no separate site), so Booksense's addition makes it look like the event is at Seminary, not at 57th Street.
The problems that lilithcat noted are some of the issues when trying to mesh data together. We're pretty much stuck with the data that BookSense has in their feed. Their feed, of course, doesn't have all of the information that we need and the information that is in the feed isn't always 100% correct. I noticed a couple of what looked like human errors on the data input side of things.
The booksense data also doesn't have the idea of events at different locations like our Local Events data structure. In order to indicate an event at a different location the booksense entries usually indicate the different location in the description but all of these things are apparently entered by the individual bookshops so the data and formatting will vary.
Import of the booksense data doesn't supercede LT member events. It's actually the other way around. If a matching event already existed in Local then I didn't import the booksense event.
The event webpage links on the coop page are what the Booksense feed listed. I'll have to see about working out a way to deal with that. It shouldn't be big deal but it'll have to happen in 2 weeks. I'm off for the next two taking care of our new baby! Yay!
These, of course, would all be north american events, wouldn't they.
Anonymous -
Yes, of course they would. BookSense is an association of independent bookstores in the United States. I'm sure that if you are aware of a similar organization in Europe or elsewhere that was interested in providing a similar feed, LT would be happy to talk to them.
And, of course, you can do as many other LT members have done and continue to do: add venues and events yourself.
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