Bigger than the Library of Congress
LOC photo taken by Abby, two days after LibraryThingbecame a "real company" in 2006
We're not trying to say that LibraryThing compares with the LC, in a "real library" sense. We have, for example, 24,119 copies of Tolkien's The Hobbit in LibraryThing, and 15,545 copies of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (and don't even get me started on the Harry Potter books!* No real library stocks books in those kind of quantities!
But the fun of LibraryThing isn't just in the widely held books, it's in those that are shared by only 10 or 20 other members. It's easy to find someone who has read The Hobbit. Finding someone to discuss your more obscure books isn't quite so simple. But on LibraryThing, you can. There are 8 members who list The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects—8 members who can find each other and have a common interest. The "long tail" of LibraryThing is long indeed.
*See the top 1,000 books and authors here
Labels: library of congress, milestones
posted by Abby at 3:59 PM
19 Comments:
Alas, now that we've topped it, what have we to aspire towards?
Well, now we have to watch the unique works number which currently places LibraryThing between 54th and 55th place.
54 U. of Tennessee - Knoxville 3,734,731
54.5 LibraryThing 3,695,532
55 North Carolina State U. 3,687,733
My first thought was aspiring towards having more unique books cataloged than LoC. Not sure if that is possible, although it might be due to foreign books that will be in LT but not LoC.
One of my great joys is getting in touch with the only other person who has one of "my best" books!
I want a list of the top 1000 nonfiction books.
I wonder who has the most uniques on LT? How can I fish out that data? Just for curiosity's sake.
The unique works number is indeed one to watch. But another thing to work towards would be a way of marking books as actually owned, so as to counter inflation from wish-list entries – presumably the Library of Congress catalogue doesn't include those!
(BTW, it's 'Tolkien'.)
"But another thing to work towards would be a way of marking books as actually owned, so as to counter inflation from wish-list entries"
I imagine this will be the case when they get around to introducing Collections?
"But the fun of LibraryThing isn't just in the widely held books, it's in those that are shared by only 10 or 20 other members."
That's why it's so frustrating that Tim banned the practice of asking people to fix incorrect data in their entries (http://www.librarything.com/topic/30795) and has not yet, as far as I can tell, provided any data-validation tools for which that was a gap-filling solution. Were he finally to do so, that " 'long tail' indeed" would be even more interesting (see post #41 in the thread above). That he has not, reïnforces my impression that he's become more interested in marketing the Harry Potter and Hobbit-level user data to libraries (because how many libraries are going to have those long-tail books, anyway?).
I see no connection between allowing members to badger each other about personal data and our alleged interest in pushing Harry Potter.
"how many libraries are going to have those long-tail books, anyway?"
You sure about that one?
Does the 32million plus books include the perfume collection that one member entered on the site? (grin)
might be fun to indicate how many books LT had when a member first joined
Obviously...there's just no pleasing us:)
Congratulations on the milestone!
papalazarou:
There is a way to get close to this data:
Export your catalog as a tab-delimited file (it will come with a .xls suffix). The first column will be "book ID". This number is how many books had been entered into LT prior to that book. Because of deleted books, it runs higher than the actual total. (It looks like it's currently about 15% high).
So, for instance, I can see that there had been 133,072 books entered when I entered my first one on Sept. 19, 2005.
YES! I just entered "The National Uncanny" the other day! That feels like win! (It's full of typos, though.)
Brunellus said...
The unique works number is indeed one to watch. But another thing to work towards would be a way of marking books as actually owned, so as to counter inflation from wish-list entries – presumably the Library of Congress catalogue doesn't include those!
Although I too assume that LoC has all the books it lists somewhere, that doesn't mean they can find them.
I was in DC doing some research in the LoC documents collection last year and on a lark I decided one day to request a few books in the main reading room. I picked 4 titles that were small enough to flip through, unusual enough to seem worth the trouble and were listed in the catalog as available in the reading room. I filled out the little form, waited and received no books but rather 4 little slips of paper telling me that they couldn't find my selection. When I asked, a librarian told me that I could fill out another form and wait a week or two while they did a more comprehensive search. I wasn't that serious and wasn't going to be in town that long, but needless to say I was a bit disappointed.
eromsted-
i too had this problem at the loc. the answer i was given was that, in the not so distant past, people were allowed to roam the stacks of the loc. as in any library, things ended up getting misshelved as a result. imagine how difficult it must be to locate a misshelved book amongst 32 million books! but they have a team of people who's only job is to go through each book in the entire collection and make sure things slowly get back to where they should be. i do not envy them that job.
I'm new to this site and still trying to determine a valid purpose for spending all the time to enter your books. Is it just a fun past time or is it really practical for an individual person to do this?
Dear Anonymous (from 11/07) ... For me, there's finally a sense of what you might call 'inventory control' as in 'now I know for sure what I have and where it is on my shelves'. I put my books in call number order, discovering that I had several titles in multiple copy I didn't know about.
But, practically, this also yields a full, descriptive inventory for insurance purposes. THAT may be the 'valid purpose' you were asking about.
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