LibraryThing ( Felicity Dykas August 25, 2009

Based on a presentation given at ALA annual – Authority Control 2.0? / Tim Spalding, Founder, LibraryThing Agenda (5 minutes each) – About LibraryThing – Features that might be great additions to traditional OPACs – Useful bibliographic and authority data

About LibraryThing An online catalog Developed by users Includes bibliographic record data from LC, Amazon, and 600+ other catalogs Easy to become a member and catalog your own collection

Statistics Members 818,990 Books cataloged 43,056,890 Tags added 54,830,045 Unique works 4,783,860 Total reviews 813,461 Works reviewed 324,605 Ratings 6,921,761 User-contributed covers 1,598,979 Author photos 37,322 User groups 5,571 Forum topics 69,002 Forum messages 1,440,361 Source: 8/24/2009

Bibliographic data Sources – Library of Congress – Amazon – 690+ other sources – Members Add books

Search for title in LC catalog

Search for title in Amazon database

Search LibraryThing

Users participate There are rules Users can – Add records and data – Combine/separate entities Books/Works Authors Tags – Participate in discussion forums

MU libraries on LibraryThing LibraryThing Local – MizzouHillelLibrary – Walter C Daniel Resource Center – Collections can be private, too

Features that might be great additions to traditional OPACs Let everyone participate – Add information to records – Disambiguate: Combine/separate Add more bibliographic and author data Give search starts User forums and discussions

Tags “Tags are a simple way to categorize books according to how you think of them, not how some library official does. Anything can be a tag—just type words or phrases, separated by commas. … Tags are particularly useful for searching and sorting—when you need a list of all your novels or all the books at the summer home.”

Subject headings and tags Title: HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS, Fifth Edition

Add and correct data Add book reviews Add ratings Add book covers Add Common Knowledge terms – “… interesting facts and data about books, authors, editions, and other items.”

Combining “LibraryThing lets users be librarians, editing and correcting book data as they see fit. This means combining two author names together (C.S. Lewis and Clive Staples Lewis, for example); combining two tags which are synonymous (‘nonfiction’ with ‘non-fiction’); and combining ‘books’ of different editions into a more global "work".”

Common Knowledge (for works and authors) Agent - Awards and honors - Birthdate - Blurbers - Burial location - Canonical name - Canonical title - Connections - Date of death - Dedication - Description - Disambiguation notice - Education - Epigraph - First words - Gender - Important events - Important places - Last words - Legal name - Media reviews - Nationality - Occupations - Organizations - Original publication date - Other names - People/Characters - Places of residence - Publisher's editor - Quotations - Relationships - Series - Short biography Examples: Work: Author:

Collocate editions/works “A work brings together all different copies of a book, regardless of edition, title variation, or language. This works system will provide improved shared cataloging, recommendations and more. For example, if you wanted to discuss M. I. Findley's The Ancient Economy, you wouldn't really care whether someone else had the US or the British edition, the first edition or the second.”

Provide search starts Zeitgeist Overview – 50 largest libraries – 25 most reviewed books – Authors who are members – Top 75 authors (by number of copies) – 25 most reviewed books – Top books – Top 25 books by star rating – Top 25 taggers – Etc.

Book covers

Information we might be able to use in cataloging

Author profiles Author page: Hendrik Willem Van Loon willemvan willemvan – Link to Wikipedia author page – Link to record about his papers at Cornell – Books he has written – Disambiguation information – Birth and death dates – Gender – Nationality – Etc.

Disambiguation notices C.S. Lewis used the pen name N.W. Clerk when he first published "A Grief Observed". His early verse was published under the pen name "Clive Hamilton". ( Elizabeth Berg is composed of 3 distinct authors (edit assignments). LibraryThing has only recently introduced this feature. In the near future distinct authors will have their own pages. ( assignments

Editions Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance Descriptions: Details (Other languages, subjects, etc.): Editions:

MARC records Elements of user experience – see MARC records

Subject information Subject headings Tags Reviews Descriptions

Series clouds dge/clouds.php dge/clouds.php dge/clouds.php dge/clouds.php

Common knowledge Various pieces of information about authors and works Examples: Work: Author:

CueCat barcode scanning CueCat_barcode_scanning CueCat_barcode_scanning

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