¿Qué hay en tu estantería? (Spanish books)

Cataloging your Spanish-language books just got a lot easier. We already have user-translated Spanish language site, www.LibraryThing.es, our fourth-most popular site. But we didn't have good Spanish sources.

So today I've added 20 Spanish sources, including a bookstore and nineteen libraries.

The bookstore, deastore.com, is an excellent source for recent books, popular paperbacks and cover images, mostly from Spain. Deastore is critical insofar as Amazon, our most-used source, has no Spanish or Latin American site, and few Spanish books. The libraries provide depth, including older books and--although all but one are from Spain itself--books from elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world.

You can add sources to your options here. Here's the complete list:

• deastore.com
• Biblioteca Central de La Rioja
• Biblioteca de Castilla y Leon
• Biblioteca Foral de Bizkaia
• Biblioteca Pública de Avila
• Biblioteca Pública de Burgos
• Biblioteca Pública de Palencia
• Biblioteca Pública de Salamanca
• Biblioteca Pública de Segovia
• Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes
• Congreso de los Diputados
• Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
• Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
• Universidad Complutense de Madrid
• Universidad de Alcalá de Henares
• Universidad de Alicante
• Universidad de Burgos
• Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)
• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
• Universidad Pública de Navarra

Did you make it this far? The first 25 people to write to tim@librarything.com from a Spanish-language email address (.es, .mx, .ar, etc) will get a free membership. (If you don't have one, write to us in Spanish.) And for the next few days, if you run a Spanish-language blog, we'll send you five memberships—to blog or just to give to friends.

Hungary! Hungary!

LibraryThing is now open for Hungarian cataloging!

We've added two sources—the Hungarian National Library (Országos Széchényi Könyvtár) and the Hungarian National Shared Catalogue (Magyar Országos Közös Katalógus), a 17-library consortium which, if I understand correctly, includes the national library as well.*

We are looking forward to welcoming more Hungarians to LibraryThing. Our Hungarian-language site, hu.LibraryThing.com is at an advanced stage of translation. But we need your help. As we release each language, we realize how critical it is to build momentum. We've had success in Holland and Denmark because there were already active Dutch and Danish communities on LibraryThing, and because I knew a good many bloggers in both countries. So far, our Hungarian community has been small (114 members at last count) and I don't know a single Hungarian blogger! So, if you want this to succeed, spread the word. Blog about it! Tell friends! Stand on a street corner!

Oh, and since you read down this far, how about a free account? The first 20 members who write to me from a .hu address** will get a free premium account. Just send me your member name to tim@librarything.com. If you run a blog in Hungarian, I'll send you five more to give away to visitors.

*I'd love some clarification on this. We don't have a bookstore yet—the way we've added Bol-Bruna for Dutch, and deastore.com for Italy. We'd love to add one. Update: Apparnetly, The National Library goes on siesta between 23:00-3:00 CET (GMT +1).
**If you're a native Hungarian speaker in Romania or elsewhere, write me and we'll work it out.

The flag image above is by Flickr user antenae, and is licensed under the Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Her profile lists here as "24, female, Budapest, Hungary." Does she want a free membership?

Rijksmuseum Research Library

After yesterday's announcement of four major Dutch-language sources, we got an email from someone at the Rijksmuseum Research Library, inviting us to add them too. We were happy to.

As anyone who's been to the Netherlands knows, the Rijksmuseum (site, Wikipedia) is Amsterdam's phenomenal art museum. The Research Library (site, Wikipedia) is apparently the largest art historical museum library in the Netherlands, housing some 140,000 monographs as well as serials and auction catalogs. It's also first art-history library in LibraryThing, and should be useful for bibliophiles with art interests.