Thingology (LibraryThing's ideas blog)

Open Shelves Classification Update: What We Are Working On

2008-09-12T13:49:00.004-04:00

Our first priority is to set the top level categories for the OSC.

Many ideas have been discussed in the thread on this topic, now it is time to test if these categories actually represent the holdings of public libraries.

We need volunteers to take the working list of top level categories listed in the wiki (http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.p...) and look at online catalogs for public libraries. Most online catalogs will allow you to search by Dewey Call Number, so Laena is going through and finding the correlating Dewey Numbers for each of the top level categories. She should be done this later today and will post the information to the wiki. Please search by Dewey Numbers correlated to our top level categories and then report on the wiki how many books turn up for each category. You will need to figure out how to search using wildcards in your catalog so that you turn up books will longer Dewey Numbers as well.

Once we have this information, we can then evaluate if the working list of top level categories needs to be edited.

The Jean Valjean of the library world

2008-08-28T04:28:00.006-04:00

The biblioblogosphere--and Uncontrolled Vocabulary--are abuzz about Heidi Dalibor, a Grafton, MN, 20-year-old arrested for failing to pay library fines.

After keeping two paperbacks (White Oleander and another of Angels and Demons) out for five months, Ms. Dalibor's library turned her over to the police. She ignored a letter about a court date, and woke up to policemen taking her away.

What do I think? Well, I'm glad you asked.

First, libraries and other book professionals generally go out of their way to insulate patrons from law-enforcement activity. Right-thinking librarians call lawyers if police ask questions about check-outs or computer use without a warrant. My local bookstore in Georgetown, KramerBooks, defied a federal subpoena to turn over sales records showing that Monica Lewinsky bought a book for president Clinton—on reader-privacy grounds. Vermont Librarians, alarmed that the Patriot Act could forbid them from confirming that the FBI had accessed records, posted cards reading "The FBI has not been here. Watch carefully for the discrete removal of this sign."

All this show admirable professional ethics and, except for the Kramerbooks case*, I agree with the policies. But there is something strange about being so forward in defense of your patrons' right to use the library, but throwing them to the wolves when they misuse it. I know there's a categorical difference between protecting reader privacy and protecting readers from paying their debts**. But there's also a big quantitative difference between misusing library computers to receive child pornography and failing to return two paperbacks. I'd like my local library to take it easy on the cuffs and mug shots as a general principle, not just when a privacy issue is at stake.

Second, I can't understand the perverse glee so many bloggers find in this matter, or the overheated posturing about "public tax dollars." Libraries exist to shovel books at local residents. The goal is lifelong readers, not this week's "returners." Every now and then people will abuse the rules and keep books for too long. Moderate fines are an appropriate response to that. But the goal is getting the books out there, and some loss should be expected.***

Third, I recently returned an audiobook to the Portland Public Library after, um, more months than five****. They were really nice about it. And I am really really glad I didn't end up in jail.

*The book was evidence completely unrelated to its content or the reading habits of either party. Would KramerBooks turn over sales records if someone was found bludgeoned to death with a Sanskrit dictionary, with a receipt inside?
**One wonders if, when a library turns you over to the police, they list the book titles involved. They certainly should not.
***Another recent Uncontrolled Vocabulary covered the drooling-patron problem--what do you do when a patron has advanced Parkinsons, or a similar problem, and unintentionally ruins the books they take out? I believe it was Greg who gave the best answer--go out and buy another book!
****I had lost one of the CDs and was convinced it would turn up someday. It did.

BookFinder Report

2008-08-28T02:46:00.004-04:00

The 2008 BookFinder Report is now out. The report, compiled by the staff of BookFinder.com, a cross-site used-book search service, tracks hot used books.

On top of the "Arts" section for the fifth year—Madonna's Sex. I'm not sure why. LibraryThing members rate it pretty poorly.

Then again, it's bound in metal...

Check it out: http://report.bookfinder.com/2008/

Lamination...

2008-08-13T04:55:00.003-04:00

I love the Despair, Inc. posters, so this library-related riff got to me.

Poster by Darien superstar John Blyberg (CC-Attribution); hat-tip Michael Stephens.

I've wondered if lamination and similar protective techniques in libraries don't encourage the very disaster they anticipate—"Oh, the book has a plastic cover on it? I guess that means its okay if I read it while eating a meatball sub!"

Index Translationum

2008-08-12T10:49:00.002-04:00

Anirvan, over at the Bookfinder Journal, stumbled over a book-translation database called Index Translationum* operated by—of all things—UNESCO.

The search engine is early-90s bad, but the results are decent. Here are all the translations it knows of my wife's The Mermaids Singing:

Carey, Lisa: L'île aux sirènes [French] / Catherine Pageard / Paris: Presses de la Cité [France], 1999. 331 p. English: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: Havfruenes sang [English] / Elsa Frogner / Oslo: Egmont Hjemmets bokforl. [Norway], 1999. 253 s. Norwegian: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: L'île aux sirènes [French] / Catherine Pageard / Montréal: Libre expression [Canada], 1999. 331 p. English: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: Jeg kan høre havfruer synge [Danish] / Ulla Warrern / Kbh.: Lindhardt og Ringhof [Denmark], 1998. 242 p. English: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: Merineitsite laul [Estonian] / Uta Saar / Tallinn: Perioodika [Estonia], 2000. 284, 1 p. English: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: Das Lied der Insel : Roman [German] (Vollst. Taschenbuchausg.) / Gabriele Gockel; Petra Hrabak / München: Droemer Knaur [Germany], 2002. 347 S. English: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: Das Lied der Insel : Roman [German] (Vollst. Taschenbuchausg.) / Gabriele Gockel; Petra Hrabak / München: Droemer Knaur [Germany], 2001. 347 S. English: The mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: L'île aux sirènes [French] / Catherine Pageard / Paris: France loisirs [France], 2000. 294 p., couv. ill. en coul. English: The mermaids singings
Carey, Lisa: Merenneitojen laulu [Finnish] (ISBN: 951-0-22963-6) / Eva Siikarla / Porvoo, Helsinki, Juva: WSOY [Finland], 1998. 360 s. English: Mermaids singing
Carey, Lisa: Merenneitojen laulu [Finnish] (ISBN: 951-643-934-9) / Eva Siikarla / Helsinki: Suuri suomalainen kirjakerho [Finland], 1998. 305, 1 s. English: Mermaids singing

There are some clear dups, and its missing the Dutch translation, Luister naar de zee (known to LibraryThing). Still, it's pretty good.

The various FAQ pages on the site aren't very helpful. Does anyone know where it comes from and who's really making it? Is someone parsing MARC records from national libraries? Is it done by hand? The logo suggests CDs are involved. Can I buy them? I get a dump of the data?

*As a former classics scholar the name caught me. Was this the return of "international Latin"? (And if so, is the Foreign Service looking to hire?) Alas, the Index dates from 1932.

Kaboom!

2008-08-07T12:48:00.004-04:00

Did you hear that? It was the sound of LibraryThing announcing A million free covers for your library or bookstore.

Won't someone in the library world, um, blog this?

Open Shelves Classification: Update and Summary

2008-08-06T15:02:00.002-04:00

Note: This post was created by David and Laena, but reposted by me for a stupid technical reason. (Tim)

Hello Librarythingers, librarians and classification fans, we are happy to join you as facilitators of this exciting project! To learn more about us, see Tim's introduction. Hadrian's library (above) seemed an appropriate illustration, as we strive to create a new system upon the building blocks of the old.

To reiterate the initial goals of the project, Open Shelves Classification (OSC) is a free, "humble," modern, open-source, crowd-sourced replacement for the Dewey Decimal System.

It will also be:

Collaboratively written. The OSC itself should be written socially--slowly, with great care and testing--but socially. (This is already underway via the group Build the Open Shelves Classification and the LibraryThing Wiki.)
Collaboriately assigned. As each level of OSC is proposed and ratified, members will be invited to catalog LibraryThing's books according to it. (Using LibraryThing's fielded bibliographic wiki, Common Knowledge.)

And include:

Progressive development. Written "level-by-level" (DDC's classes, divisions, etc.), in a process of discussion, schedule proposals, adoption of a tentative schedule, collaborative assignment of a large number of books, statistical testing, more discussion, revision and "solidification." This has already begun.
Public-library focus. LibraryThing members are not predominantly academics, and academic collections, being larger, are less likely to change to a new system. Also, academic collections mostly use the Library of Congress System, which is already in the public domain. This is also the place and audience that has demonstrated the most need for change (see BISAC and other non-Dewey conversions already underway).
Statistical testing. As far as we are aware, no classification system has ever been tested statistically as it was built. Yet there are various interesting ways of doing just that. For example, it would be good to see how a proposed shelf-order matches up against other systems, like DDC, LCC, LCSH and tagging. If a statistical cluster in one of these systems ends up dispersed in OSC, why?

Where are we now? Since its inception, there has been consistent and productive discussion on the LibraryThing group Build the Open Shelves Classification, and circeus began an excellent wiki Open Shelves Classification that summarizes the current OSC consensus. The wiki is where the work will be staged as it is developed by all of us. So far, the wiki includes consensus on materials that must be included, call number requirements and proposed scheme, and the choice of top-level classes.

Where do we go from here? We feel that the most important issues to determine are:

Top-level classes. Findability is key. Terms need to be familiar and clear (not abstract), roughly 12-15 categories, and relavent to the public library audience and their needs. Library data would be very helpful here! (OSC is focusing more on task (what people find: history, gardening, sci-fi) versus audience (who is finding: children, women, dogs) when determining top-level terms.)
Alpha-numeric decisions and punctuation. TBD. A numbered system that doesn't require equal digits is so far the most popular format (10.6.245.20). As for punctuation, the debate continues--dots or dashes?
Factors be determined locally or at a later stage of development. We need to be as focused and specific in our tasks as possible, and there are many decisions we will not be undertaking. (For example, Cutter numbers and possibly non-book materials.)

David and I are simply facilitators, and we need LibraryThing Members to help monitor threads and contribute valuable content. Please comment below if you want to volunteer to monitor a particular thread to make sure we do not miss anything. Also, people should continue to add content to the wiki as consensus emerges from the threads. Although theoretical discussion is fascinating, examples from your library or your personal experience are what will make the OSC usable.

We look forward to working with our fellow LibraryThing members!

Open Shelves Classification: Welcome Laena and David

2008-08-05T12:18:00.001-04:00

Back in July I proposed the Open Shelves Classification (OSC), a new, free, crowdsourced replacement for the Dewey Decimal System. I also created a group to start in on the project.

The proposal included a call for a volunteer to lead the group. I was happy to write the software, and members would create the OSC, but someone with a library degree was needed to shepherd the project and make the occasional tough decision.

I've found two: the LIS team of Laena McCarthy and David Conners. It turns out, I already knew them. Abby and I met with Laena and David, back at ALA 2007, when they were MLS students doing a joint LibraryThing-related project called Folksonomies in Action. They impressed us then. It was extraordinary to talk to librarians with a deep understanding and creative take on the ideas LibraryThing was exploring. Since then Laena and David have started promising careers as librarians and professors. So, after receiving word they were interested in the project, we are only too happy to bring them on.

Laena M. McCarthy (user: laena). Laena is currently an Assistant Professor and Image Cataloger at the Pratt Institute in NYC. Her bio contains the priceless bit:

"Previously, she worked in Antarctica as the world's Southernmost librarian, where she provided a remote research station with access to information. She incorporated into the library the first permanent art gallery in Antarctica."

Laena's teaching and research focus on the application of bottom-up, usability-centric design and collaboration. She is currently researching image tagging, FRBR for works of art & architecture, and information architecture. Her work has been published in Library Journal and the forthcoming Magazines for Libraries 2008.

In her free time, among other things, she can be found making jam, competing in food competitions, scuba diving and writing.

David Conners (user: conners). David is the Digital Collections Librarian at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. At Haverford, David works to make the College's unqiue materials, such as the first organized protest against slavery in the New World, available online. He also oversees the College's oral history program and the audio component of Special Collections exhibits such as "A Few Well Selected Books."

David's research interests include subject analysis, FRBR, and, occasionally, doped ablators. His work has been published in Library Journal, The Serials Librarian, and Physics of Plasmas.

The torch is passed! From this point on, it's their project to direct. But we're in agreement on their role: They aren't royalty, they're facilitators. They're there to listen and to encourage conversation. They're there to guide things toward consensus. They're there too see the project stays on track and true to its goals. They're there to propose forking the project or moving it elsewhere, if that's what it needs and the community wants it.
Laena and David are doing this for fun and interest. As a fun side-project with no financial component—OSC is by definition public domain in every respect—we can't pay them. But we've promised to help pay their way to LIS conferences, if someone wants them to talk about it. (At least one group already does.) And there's the hope that, if OSC can accomplish its goals, they will have helped create something highly beneficial for libraries and library patrons everywhere.

If you're interested in the project, come join the group and find out more.

API to Common Knowledge

2008-08-04T09:51:00.004-04:00

In case you don't subscribe to the main blog, there's a development there of interest to readers of this blog: We've unwrapped a free public API to all our Common Knowledge data—series, fictional places, characters, author educational histories, etc.

I'd love to see some of this data appear in library catalogs. The series coverage is really quite excellent.

At one point I made a series widget for LibraryThing for Libraries--listing other members of the series--but I didn't deploy it. There was some concern that LT's series data would fight with the libraries' own series data. If an LTFL library wants to use it, however, let me know.

Crowdsourcing Dr. Horrible, Jeff Atwood

2008-08-03T14:01:00.000-04:00

Do you recognize this man?

Yes, it's Dr. Horrible, star of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (played by Neil Patrick Harris, the former Doogie Howser). Dr. Horrible is quirky web-only super-hero musical comedy created by Joss Whedon (Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Abby, Sonya and I are fans.

Anyway, I was re-watching the video and noticed two copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on one of Dr. Horrible's shelves. As a joke on our Legacy Libraries program, where members collaborate to catalog libraries by Jefferson*, Plath or Yeats, I suggested that members catalog Dr. Horrible's other books.

So they, um, did. They didn't start a catalog, but they figured them out even so. I was particularly impressed they were able to figure out the ones on the left, making a guess and then asking a member who had the book (Albert L. Lehninger's Principles of Biochemistry) to check the spine. The guess was right.

Score one for crowdsourcing!

Jeff Atwood? Which brings me to the other Dr. Horrible, Jeff Atwood, programmer, podcaster and author of the influential blog Coding Horror.

Jeff published a great post, "Programmers Don't Read Books -- But You Should," which included a shot of his "programming bookshelf." They're not just any books, but his enduring favorites. As he writes:

"The best programming books are timeless. They transcend choice of language, IDE, or platform. They do not explain how, but why. If you feel compelled to clean house on your bookshelf every five years, trust me on this, you're buying the wrong programming books."

With Jeff's permission, I started him an account, and asked members to help catalog his books, using the photo he provided. Again, the were able to do it with ease.

Two ideas follow naturally from this:

I'd love to see LibraryThing members catalog people's books from shelf-photos. As I wrote on the Atwood thread, I could see this being a paid service, with part of the proceeds going to charity.
Aren't there sites where regular people take apart celebrity photos, identifying shoes and clothing so other people can copy them? Wouldn't it be fun/ironic to do that for books, taking apart TV, movies and candids for the books in them? Of course, celebrities are not necessarily great readers, but people do occasionally read in movies, and some celebrities do too. For example, the word on the street is that Marilyn Monroe really was reading Ulysses.

Don't worry. I've got a half-dozen bugs and important features to go through before toying with anything like this.

Also, the freeze ray needs work.

*Not to be confused with Dr. Horrible villain Fake Jefferson.

Google goes after the Library of Congress for "mature content"

2008-07-30T12:32:00.005-04:00

UPDATE: They relented. Woo-hoo!

LibraryThing shows Google Adsense ads on a small number of templates. The ads appear only if you're not a member at all—paid or unpaid. They don't make much money, but we've never had a problem with them.

Today I got a form letter from Google, alerting me that Google had detected "adult or mature content" on LibraryThing. They gave one example, the LibraryThing.fr page for the Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) "Erotic stories." No doubt some algorithm caught a few keywords, like "sex" or the common porn-word "Lolita" (it's a book, guys).

Needless to say, they run ads against most of these books on Google Book Search. Our competitors, who all rely on Google Adsense for all their revenue run ads against the same books, apparently without incident (although, I suppose, one can hope!). I must therefore conclude, the problem is the Library of Congress Subject Headings, and that it's a good thing the Sandy Berman-inspired LCSH "Strap-on Sex" hasn't made it into LibraryThing yet!

A follow-up email triggered another form-letter, including the helpful suggestion to remove content like:

"image or video content containing lewd or provocative poses, strategically covered nudity, see-through or sheer clothing, and close-ups of breasts, butts, or crotches."

I have accordingly been consulting with Casey on how to remove all the butt-shots from the Yale University MARC records.

I have three days to comply or be terminated. So, what do I do? Clearly I'm not getting anywhere with their response system. And LibraryThing has something like 100-millon pages. Should I start running pages against keyword lists before showing Google Ads?

That sounds like a big pain, I'll tell you—and not worth it.

Wikimania 2008 (Alexandria, Egypt)

2008-07-15T09:18:00.004-04:00

In other news, I'm currently on a train to New York, from which I fly to Athens, with a day-long layover, and then Alexandria, Egypt, where I am due to talk at Wikimania 2008, the annual Wikipedia/Wikimedia conference. I'm talking on "LibraryThing and Social Cataloging."

I plan to center my talk on how LibraryThing's social production, or "Social Cataloging," stacks up against the Wikipedia model and similar projects. I think there are some interesting similarities, and more interesting departures. I shall post a screencast, at a minimum.

Anyone know these people? I am particularly eager to mingle with the other attendees and speakers. Apart from Brewster Kahl (Internet Archive), I hardly see a name I recognize. But I'm sure there will be some interesting conversations.

When it comes to Wikipedia, I'm no expert. My account lists some 746 edits since 2004, which probably puts me in the top percent, but my output is spotty, and I have never been obsessed with the site as some have.

Things not to say around Jimmy Wales. Worse, I am not a true believer. Of course, I think Wikipedia is extraordinary. I use it every day. When it's works, like most pop culture, it's an unmatched resource. But from working mostly on topics of Greek history, I have acquired a sour perspective on Wikipedia's ability to resolve conflicts, tamp down ignorance, and cover topics which, quite simply, require more than curiosity and popular secondary sources.

Alexander the Great, for example, has seen periodic, bitter warfare on national or sexual grounds and, although randomly wonderful, with extensive hyperlinking and some exceptional tidbits, has never grown into a decent summary. It's lumpy, unbalanced, poorly written and poorly sourced—a bright fourteen year-old child sitting next to you on a bus, telling you everything he knows.* Parts are good. Parts are bad. Parts are just off somehow—their correction requiring un-Wikipedia-esque virtues like restraint, proportionality and style. At one point I watched it closely and made substantial edits. I've moved on. In my opinion, if the Wiki culture and process were going to produce a good article on Alexander, they would have done so already.

If that's too pessimistic, it's surely true of bit players like Ada of Caria, Aristander of Telmessus or a work like the Geoponica? I think all three are passable now, but almost all the work is mine. Not only am I not scalable, but it shouldn't work that way. Tim Spalding, a PhD drop-out whose knowledge of the Geoponica is mostly second hand, even if he does read Greek, should not be the almost sole author of the article on this rather important work.**

Anyone know Alexandria? I should have no trouble filling my layover in Athens. I've been a few times before, so I'll be filling holes. But I've never been to Egypt.

I'll have early mornings, nights and one day free in Alexandria. (I'm not going to try to get to Cairo and the pyramids.) I want to make the most of the time I have, and feel extremely ignorant. Although Hellenistic Alexandria was a research interest of mine, the ancient city is largely gone, and I know little about what came after. I love Cavafy, so I shall probably check out his house museum, but I am completely ignorant about Durrell, the usual touchstone. Nor is Alexandria what it was in their day--the Greeks, Jews, Albanians and other minorities have mostly left. What the modern city is like, I have no idea. I can't count to ten in Arabic. I don't even have a guidebook. This is the new, non-obsessive tourist me. ..

If you know the city, leave comments. Tell me where to go and I'll tell you what I thought of it! Think of it as social production of tourist memories...

*My favorite Wikipedia criticism is surely Karen Schneider's, best expressed with reference to Orson Scott Card's page:

"But if you read this blog you know I have written that Wikipedia often seems more like a Secret Treehouse Club than everyone’s encyclopedia. Card’s Wikipedia page isn’t a biography, it’s an encomium by true believers who maintain fierce control over Card’s myth."

Build the Open Shelves Classification

2008-07-08T01:46:00.005-04:00

This mural is said to depict Dewey and the railroad service he gave to Lake Placid, FL. It's time to throw Dewey under the train.

I hereby invite you to help build the Open Shelves Classification (OSC), a free, "humble," modern, open-source, crowd-sourced replacement for the Dewey Decimal System.

I've been speaking of doing something like this for a while, but I think it's finally going to become a reality. LibraryThing members are into it and after my ALA panel talk, a number of catalogers expressed interest too. Best of all, one library director has signed on as eager to implement the system, when it comes available. Hey, one's a start!

The Call. I am looking for one-to-five librarians willing to take leadership on the project. LibraryThing is willing to write the (fairly minimal) code necessary, but not to lead it.

As leaders, you will be "in charge" of the project only as a facilitator and executor of a consensus. Like Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, your influence will depend on listening to others and exercising minimal direct power.

For a smart, newly-minted librarian, this could be a big opportunity. You won't be paid anything, but, hey, there's probably a paper or two in it, right?

Why it's necessary. The Dewey Decimal System® was great for its time, but it's outlived that. Libraries today should not be constrained by the mental models of the 1870s, doomed to tinker with an increasingly irrelevant system. Nor should they be forced into a proprietary system—copyrighted, trademarked and licensed by a single entity—expensive to adopt and encumbered by restrictions on publishing detailed schedules or coordinating necessary changes.

In recent years, a number of efforts have been made to discard Dewey in favor of other systems, such as BISAC, the "bookstore system." But none have proved good enough for widespread adoption, and license issues remain.

The vision. The Open Shelves Classification should be:

Free. Free both to use and to change, with all schedules and assignments in the public domain and easily accessible in bulk format. Nothing other than common consent will keep the project at LibraryThing. Indeed, success may well entail it leaving the site entirely.
Modern. The OSC should map to current mental models--knowing these will eventually change, but learning from the ways other systems have and haven't grown, and hoping to remain useful for some decades, at least.
Humble. No system--and least of all a one-dimensional shelf order--can get at "reality." The goal should be to create a something limited and humble--a "pretty good" system, a "mostly obvious" system, even a "better than the rest" system--that allows library patrons to browse a collection physically and with enjoyment.
Collaboratively written. The OSC itself should be written socially--slowly, with great care and testing--but socially. (I imagine doing this on the LibraryThing Wiki.)
Collaboriately assigned. As each level of OSC is proposed and ratified, members will be invited to catalog LibraryThing's books according to it. (I imagine using LibraryThing's fielded bibliographic wiki, Common Knowledge.)

I also favor:

Progressive development. I see members writing it "level-by-level" (DDC's classes, divisions, etc.), in a process of discussion, schedule proposals, adoption of a tenative schedule, collaborative assignemnt of a large number of books, statistical testing, more discussion, revision and "solidification."
Public-library focus. LibraryThing members are not predominantly academics, and academic collections, being larger, are less likely to change to a new system. Also, academic collections mostly use the Library of Congress System, which is already in the public domain.
Statistical testing. To my knowledge, no classification system has ever been tested statistically as it was built. Yet there are various interesting ways of doing just that. For example, it would be good to see how a proposed shelf-order matches up against other systems, like DDC, LCC, LCSH and tagging. If a statistical cluster in one of these systems ends up dispersed in OSC, why?

I have started a LibraryThing Group, "Build the Open Shelves Classication." Members are invited to join, and to start working through the basic decisions.

LibraryThing JSON-based books API

2008-07-07T00:23:00.004-04:00

Over on the main blog I posted news about the new LibraryThing JSON-based books API (see here). The new API, which supplements our works API, comes with a small library of functions to manipulate it--all open source.

The API should be of interest to the libraries, as there are a couple of cool things they can do with the API. For example, with a few tweaks, it should be possible for libraries that use LibraryThing to showcase new or selected titles—a very popular thing—to create a widget that links into their OPAC, not to Amazon or whomever.

I'll probably write some basic functions to change linking along these lines, if someone doesn't do it for me first...

Future of Cataloging

2008-07-03T15:17:00.005-04:00

Part one. Part two is here.

On Sunday I participated in the ALA panel Creating the Future of the Catalog and Cataloging. My panel-mates were Diane Hillmann, Jennifer Bowen, Roy Tennant and Martha Yee. Robert Wolven moderated.

The whole panel was four hours long, with brief presentations by each of us and a lot of conversation. I recorded almost all of it, but the quality is very poor and I'd need everyone's permission—including the questioners—to put it up. I can, however, put up my presentation. I had do re-record the screencasting part, which therefore isn't click-perfect.

The second part is here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=hD2plk4vT3Y&feature=related.

Reading the Book. As usual, I neglected to underline just what all my evidence demonstrated, expecting the evidence to speak for itself. Thus my point in mentioning my wife's book's wrong LCSH's was to point out that, while expert training is certainly valuable, the untrained taggers on LibraryThing often exceed the trained expert in having actually read the book. I should add that I say this to emphasize one way in which tagging is good, not to attack catalogers who have insisted, quite rightly, that they don't have time to read the book, and aren't being lazy or slapdash.

As you can imagine, this observation of mine has got me into some hot water. But I think it deserves saying, particularly as, despite all the discussions of cataloging vs. tagging out there, I have never seen this point mentioned.

To press my luck a bit, I'd also like to note that it sets the professional classification-vs.-tagging argument apart from similar arguments in related fields, e.g., real journalists vs. citizen journalists, real dentists vs. your dad with some string and a doorknob, etc.

But there's an easy retort here too. Once cataloging is fully distributed—with librarians around the country able to take part—we can certainly imagine a future where, in addition to everyone else, at least one qualified, degreed library professional has also read the book and classified it. Wouldn't that be the best of both worlds?

If I get some time—in short supply after letting emails pile up for a week!—I'll blog about the panel in general. Despite its topic and length, it was very well attended—the police actually removed people from the room for overcrowding! And it spurred a lot of people to come by the LibraryThing booth to congratulate me or take me up on some point or another.

Incidentally, I forgot to name Jeremy Dibbell, who heads up Legacy Libraries now, and I referred to him as an archivist, not a librarian. I do my talks ad lib and make such mistakes. Mea Culpa!

Update: Diane Hillmann posted here slides here.

Congrats to Otis

2008-07-01T21:36:00.003-04:00

Congratulations to Otis Chandler and his new wife Elizabeth Khuri-Yakub, co-founders of Goodreads. (NYT piece!)

Otis and I met at the O'Reilly TOC conference. He is both very smart and very nice. I wish them all the best.

Jason Griffey on conferences, library blogging and the death of the library

2008-07-01T02:53:00.006-04:00

I decided to do a quick 30-minute podcast with Jason Griffey (member: griffey), the Head of Library IT at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and one of my favorite Library 2.0 people.

Jason was the organizer of this year's BIGWIG Showcase, an innovative "camp"-style session at the American Library Associations conference in Anaheim. He is also the co-author of the recent Library Blogging, with Karen Coombs (who gets the first-author love).

It's my plan to talk with interesting people from all parts of the book "world." Casual blog readers should be aware, though, that this is a very library-focused talk.

We spent the first 14 minutes talking about BIGWIG and about library conference talks generally. Then we got into his book and I tried to stir things up a bit by challenging him on library blogging. We closed with the death of the library—and what can prevent it.

I may need to sit down with Library Podcasting to figure out the best way to make podcasts available. Until then, I'm just going to throw the file up as a MP3 here (here) and through this nifty flash plug-in.

Rhino sick, LibraryThing well

2008-06-28T14:57:00.003-04:00

If you're at ALA, come by the LibraryThing booth (2878) and learn about putting tags, patron reviews and recommended books into your library catalog.

Also, help us find the hole in the rhino and blow it up again!

LibraryThing at ALA—with reviews in your catalog!

2008-06-27T16:06:00.005-04:00

I've only brought one rhino this time—two rhinos cut down on the standing room—but the rhino and I will be at ALA 2008 in Anaheim (booth 2878), showing off LibraryThing for Libraries.

I'll be showing off our new reviews feature, which allow any library to add patron-reviewing to their OPAC, with review sharing between libraries and a base of 200,000 librarian-approved reviews from LibraryThing.

I think it's going to be a big deal. With luck, I'll get a screencast about it out before morning...

The Future of Cataloging at ALA

2008-06-26T17:43:00.003-04:00

If you're at ALA in Anaheim, have nothing to do Sunday morning and are interested in the future of cataloging—and who isn't?—you might be interested in the following panel:

Creating the Future of the Catalog and Cataloging

ALA Annual Conference
Sunday, June 29, 2008 from 8:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon
Anaheim Convention Center, Rm. 204B

The panelist include Roy Tennant, Jennifer Bowen, Martha Yee, Diane Hillmann—and (gulp) me!

The moderator, Robert Wolven of Columbia*, is promising to keep it snappy, with brief presentations and oodles of time to discuss the big issues.

I don't know all the panelists, but I know we include some very different visions of the future. There may be fireworks! (I won't be attacking OCLC as much as I otherwise might. Roy could disarm Rambo.)

My mini-presentation is titled "UGC: The Next Sharp Stick?" UGC is, of course, User Generated Content. And the "Next Sharp Stick? is a reference to John Hodgman's humorous one-act play "Fire: The Next Sharp Stick?" The play ends with the fire-promoting caveman being killed, of course.

What can I say? They didn't ask me on to be conservative straight-man.

*No "primary link" I can find, but see this for starters.

Zoomii: Book covers, physicality and cover usability

2008-06-26T10:48:00.007-04:00

Recognition vs. Discovery

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown	Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris

Have you played with Zoomii yet? It's a new bookstore—a skin on Amazon.com—that uses a very attractive and dynamic cover-browsing interface. Instead of text, or a mix of text and graphics, Zoomii is all covers, laid out as if they were on an "endless shelf." The effect is very impressive but also, and with due praise for the ingenuity involved, unsatisfying.

There is no shelf. Part of the problem stems from the "physicality" of the idea. The limits of shelves are the limits of the physical world. Importing physical limitations into the online world is a familiar error. As Clay Shirky remarked in 2005, we ought to be over it.

"People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you'd think we'd have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf. In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of organization on us any longer. We can do without it, and you'd think we'd have learned that lesson by now."

In Shirky's analysis, not "learning that lesson" results in information architectures like that of the original Yahoo directory:

"Yahoo, faced with the possibility that they could organize things with no physical constraints, added the shelf back. They couldn't imagine organization without the constraints of the shelf, so they added it back."

In Zoomii's case, the whole point was to add the shelf back. It was surely a conscious reversal, and therefore an audacious one, but like swearing off email in favor of handwritten correspondence or communiting in cars in favor of horses, not an efficient one.*

Covers and usability. Zoommii also helped me answer a question I have been struggling toward for some time but never fully worked out for myself: What are covers good for?

If you had asked me a month ago, I would have mentioned Gardnerian "Theory of multiple intelligences," and the contrast between visual learners and those who do better with text. This concept has a lot of relevance in my own life.** And I would have mentioned how covers were a great way to browse other people's library.

The truth is, I think, much more simple:

Covers are great for recognition, because visual memory is faster than reading.
Covers are terrible for discovery, because reading covers, with all their different typefaces and layouts, is slower than reading words.

Transferred to web design, these are fundamentally uability principles, and for the bookstore or OPAC developer up there with any overbroad dictum of Jacob Nielsen—not the full story, but a good rule-of-thumb and starting-point.

In retrospect, this patterns can be seen all over LibraryThing. On the new home page, your recently-added books are shown as covers because you are expected to recognize them at sight, but recommended books are in list format by default, because you probably aren't familiar with them. This principle also solves why list and cover view are both useful. Cover view is, in particular, a great way to scope out someone else's library quickly—when you're looking for commonality, not making a detailed assessment.

Obvious as this discovery is in retrospect—and you may have known it all along—I think it was worth spellng out carefully. In my estimation, bookstores and online library catalogs lack a clear rationale for when covers should be used and when they shouldn't. Often the idea seems to be that covers add "panache," which to some extent they do.

But there are some deeper principles at work in the decision to use covers, and the decision to put them on virtual shelves.

*In this vein there's a good deal to be said from David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous. In Weinberger-ian terms, Zoomii is a throwback to the "first order of order." Incidentally, for a quick fly-by of both Shirky and Weinberger, check out Mike Wesch's Information R/evolution.

**Although obviously a reader, I am an unusual visual person. I learned this when in a group of graduate students preparing to take Latin. We all took a standard learning-styles test so that we understood the idea. The class was perfectly split between visual and textual learners—the archaeologists were visual, the philologists textual. Except for me. I showed up on the visual side. It was a revelation to me because I couldn't even understand my fellow philologists. Confronted with the task of navigating to an unknown place and offered a choice between a map and a set of directions these people chose the directions? Were they insane?

My YouTube Break-even

2008-06-23T21:49:00.006-04:00

Dig the hole deeper.

In the last week I've started posting screencasts about LibraryThing, under my YouTube user name, LibraryThingTim. And, of course, I've been watching videos.

Today, I crossed a line I'm going to call "My YouTube Break-even." The videos I made have been watched more times than I have watched others' videos.

So, add up every time I've watched the eyeglass-catching video, FunTwo, Clay Shirky on love, Pulp, Tarkan, Fionna Apple, Weezer,* Turkish cooking videos, parkour, the anchorman and the lizard and John Stewart—which comes to 693 times—and it is just slightly less than my own videos have been watched. I have moved from being a net consumer to a net producer of YouTube videos.

The moment of relative equipoise is a special one—and rare. The sudden removal of access barriers to creative production and dissemination has created an explosion of "user generated content," but it has not lead to attention equality. Traffic on the web tends to follow power laws. A small number of blogs, websites and videos get outsized attention.

It's probably true that receiving attention correlates with giving it. People who write interesting blogs tend to read a lot of blogs too. But giving attention can never scale as fast as receiving it. If the laughing baby spent the rest of his life watching YouTube videos all day long, he will never see as many as saw his.

And some people don't even try. The folks at Universal Music Group have watched only 3,927 videos. Assuming they use the account to upload and test their own videos, they didn't even bother to watch 700 of their own videos once. And, at the extreme of this and many things, we have Britney Spears. She, or her "people"—have watched only 25 YouTube videos, but they forced the rest of us to watch her efforts 188 million times. That's 5,700 years of progressively more fetishized hip-thrusting!**

There's still hope for me. LibraryThing screencasts will never be as entertaining as exploding Mentos. And there are hundreds of 90s alternative Boston-band videos yet to watch.

I can climb out of this!

*Or Weezer, which ought to count ten times.

**Have Utnapishtim and Britney Spears ever occupied the same grammatical clause? No.

Tagmashes for Readers Advisory

2008-06-16T11:18:00.007-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about how booksellers and librarians can use LibraryThing for "readers advisory," helping readers find books they'll love. One answer, I think, is to promote and improve our "tagmashes" feature.

Readers Advisory is something of a discipline in librarianship, with a body of thinking behind it. There are also a number of well-known subscription RA tools, such as NoveList and FictonConnection, available in a very large number of US libraries. (See this page for a much larger list, which includes LibraryThing up with the big guys.)

LibraryThing can be used for Readers Advisory in a couple of ways:

Some libraries have used LibraryThing to highlight special topics (eg., new YA material at the Framingham Library)
Most LibraryThing works include recommendations—both automatic and member suggested, and with various summary and detailed lists—so you can get from a known book to a set of similar titles.
Our fielded wiki Common Knowledge links books by series, places, awards and so forth.
LibraryThing tag pages provide relevancy-ranked lists for many topics, eg., chick lit, steampunk, memetics, cozy mysteries
Tagmashes

"Tagmashes," introduced a year ago, are a variant on tags, for when a simple tag isn't good enough.

By combining two or more tags, or excluding tags, tagmashes extend tagging and nip away at some of the unique values of traditional subject classification—high granularity and hierarchy. Thus, although the tagmash France, wwii doesn't have an explicit notion of hierarchy, it works something like the LCSH World War II, 1939-1945 -- France. (And, of course, the LCSH tree is an artificial one—there's nothing in the idea that makes France a branch of World War II more than World War II is a branch of France!)

Notably, the system doesn't make tagmashes, users do. Once made, they "stick around," and may appear on related tag and subject pages, with their overlap to that page listed, testimony that a particular combination of tags made sense to someone. The system could--but does not currently--track tagmashes for relevance and usage, pruning some and elevating others. And it could allow users to edit, rate or review them for useful and accuracy.

I have it in my head that tagmashes, particularly with these additions, are one stone in the bridge between "free tagging" and traditional classification, between algorithmic recommendations and hand-generated ones, between the physical past and the digital future.

I see a world of librarians and readers creating, spreading and editing book lists that don't just "stay still"—depreciating over time, like a physical object—but shift and grow like a digital object can. And they wouldn't be the same for everyone, like a physical object, but adapt to the reader, like only a digital object can.

Anyway, here are some tagmashes to play with:

Young adult fiction involving magic — fiction, magic, young adult
Fiction related to France during World War II — France, WWII, fiction
Nonfiction related to France during World War II — France, WWII, -fiction
Classic 19c. Russian novels — 19th century, classics, novel, russia
Parenting from an Evangelical perspective — christian living, parenting
Human sexuality from an Evangelical perspective — christian living, sex
British colonialism — britain, colonialsm
"Dog memoirs" (a big genre recently) — dogs, memoir
"Drug memoirs" — drugs, memoir
Non-religious homeschool books — homeschool, -catholic, -christian, -religion
Chick lit taking place in Greece — chick lit, greece
Romances involving zombies — romance, zombies
Romances involving zombies and taking part in Greece — Null set

Salvador Dali on What's My Line?

2008-06-14T16:03:00.004-04:00

Ever since Very Short List covered LibraryThing's Legacy Libraries in May, we've all become fans of the website.

À propos of little but enjoyment, be sure to watch Salvador Dalí's appearance on "What's My Line?" (If you want a bookish excuse, one of the panelist is Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House. Does anyone suppose it remotely possible that the president of Random House would be invited on a game show today?)

Hat-tip: Philobiblos/JBD. Jeremy is also right about Russert. In the last few months I had become increasingly addicted to the podcast of Meet the Press.