Category Archives: librarything

LibraryThing and the moose

Posted on by
Reply

LibraryThing > Our poor moose

It’s taken me a while to do but I wanted to comment on this interesting post from the folks at LibraryThing about a moose incident near their building. I thought it was incredible that a moose had wandered into Portland, Maine! I’ve been there (and elsewhere throughout the state) a few times and it is one of my favorite places on earth. I would never have imagined a moose wandering around in the city proper, though.

There is a bit of irony for me personally in this story, because each time I’ve been to Maine, as well as to other areas where moose are supposedly prevalent, such as northern Minnesota, I secretly hoped to see a moose. I have struck out so far. The only place I recall seeing moose was many years ago in the area around Glacier National Park.

Maybe I’m just being grumpy

Posted on by
Reply

Marc Meola from ACRLog writes about the Wall St. Journal article on LibraryThing. What stood out to me in his post was the phrase “Maybe I’m just being grumpy…” I am glad he wrote that, admitting that sometimes we who blog can sometimes just be in a particularly negative frame of mind. That is often my problem, too. For instance when I wrote about a panel discussion at the American Library Association conference a while ago, I think I must have been in a particularly grumpy mood. I reread that post now and cringe a bit. All of this is just to lead up to a point that has been made umpteen times before, and that is, that it really pays to think carefully about the tone of one’s remarks before hitting that Publish button.

Not sure where to even begin

Posted on by
Reply

I’m not sure where to even begin with this blog post…By that I mean that so much is happening and there is so much that I’ve wanted to comment on here but haven’t done so, such that my brain is scrambled (well, more so than usual).

For example, I continue to be incredibly impressed with Tim Spalding and his introduction of LibraryThing Mobile, something I plan to make use of on a regular basis. I cannot say enough good things about the ongoing excellence and customer focus shown by Tim and his growing team. Congratulations and kudos to LibraryThing! Here’s to your ongoing success.

Then there is the hectic time at work during the past few weeks, as I have been trying to come up to speed with all of the aspects of my job. We are really focused as a group on how to best manage journal information, particularly for e-journals. There is a lot of detail I could go into but this issue gets to the heart of how our various systems interact.

I have been working very hard to prepare for the class that I will be teaching this summer (LIS578LE: Technical Services Functions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science). Class starts next week and I will be on campus at UIUC Monday through Wednesday. Tuesday and Wednesday we will meet together as a class all day. Some highlights of this preparation include the fact that this time around, I will be integrating blogs and a wiki into the class. Also for the first time I am offering students the option of purchasing a course packet. Twenty three students are currently enrolled in the class and one of the neat things about the class this year is that the thought are broken… blogmeister, Mark Lindner, will be my assigned GA from GSLIS, helping me conduct each live class session by setting up the RealAudio feed, initiating and recording my phone connection, and doing other technical support.

A lot more stuff remains to be commented on here but that’s all for now.

Are folksonomies really the better way?

Posted on by
7

I’m thoroughly enjoying conversations with my mentee @ the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He is very familiar with Web 2.0 and so naturally we have already begun a dialog about the viability of the library side of this technology trend, known as Library 2.0. I have made clear my doubts and dislikes about both the term and the movement before this. But my thoughts and views are still evolving and I am still coming to grips with some of the implications for libraries of new stuff like folksonomies. The folksonomies part of Library 2.0 in particular seems to stick in my head, maybe because I have a strong background in cataloging in academic libraries.

Below is something I wrote to my mentee in response to some points about folksonomies and I include it here simply to demonstrate or expose my line of thought. As I noted to my mentee, if I am way off base here, please take me up on it. At least feel free to challenge whatever I’ve written. After thinking about this further, I am wondering if I’m pursuing this from a logical point of view as an “either/or” situation. (Taxonomies or folksonomies.) Instead I think it is really, or will really be, a “both/and” situation.

The one thing that I still have a problem with (not with you, or what you wrote) is … and I struggle to figure out what the right words are to describe this … the ignorance of the past in libraries, even of the recent past. I understand that this is natural among those who style themselves as revolutionaries as they try to get the library community to break free of tradition and the “this is how we’ve always done it” inertia that is so prevalent. It’s not just that the past is dismissed, but that it seems — to me — to be dismissed without any awareness of or concern for the heart of WHY things are or were the way they are/were. That libraries have always striven for user interaction. Even in what some might describe as the hardest case scenario, that of the library (card) catalog, any library worth its salt pays attention to user’s needs and has updated catalog records with subject headings or subject keywords that help meet a user’s needs at his or her request. No, this is not the same as the user him/herself updating the record, I realize that. But this idea of the user having no input into the catalog is an over generalization.

What today we call folksonomies has or can have been implemented in library catalogs. It’s just that that was not how libraries or librarians felt was the best way to organize information. And I am not so sure that folksonomies and tagging and giving the power to the user really is the best way to organize information. Sure, I understand tag clouds, and I understand that there are cool ways via complicated algorithms (e.g. in LibraryThing) to auto categorize item A that’s been tagged one way with item B that’s tagged in a different way. But I have yet to see any concrete, systematic evidence that this is a better way of organizing information broadly (not just within a small user community or for one individual user). We are largely going on a premise here. As you say there will likely spring up (if there hasn’t been already) a surge of research in library journals about this very thing.

My point here is that the very basis of why we cataloged things the way we did was to serve the user, not to hinder any access. It’s a different side of the coin that many people who are excited about the library/web 2.0 stuff just don’t seem willing to accept, in part at least because they have no real idea of the foundations of modern cataloging practice.

Maybe I’m really building a straw man argument here. And I certainly have a struggle to articulate these thoughts. But take them as they are and if I’m not making sense or my points aren’t really valid, take me up on it.

LibraryThing and cataloging nirvana, er, FRBR

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve mentioned LibraryThing several times already, but I have to write about it again, this time, because of its groundbreaking and chaotic foray into cataloging nirvana, er, FRBR. Basically Tim Spalding has set LibraryThingers (LibraryThingamabobbers?) loose on figuring out what a “work” is and combining multiple versions of a work together into a “work” view in a way similar to what FRBR describes. David Bigwood of Catalogablog has already discussed this here as have Sarah Houghton of The Librarian in Black and William Denton of The FRBR Blog (see list of links here).

After working with this capability for a while, I think it is definitely a huge, big deal. As Tim writes, the intent of providing this capability in LibraryThing is social and socio-statistical (see the link to the comment from him for more explanation). And it is user controlled. Those aspects may seem like no big deal but in reality, they represent something completely different from what catalogers have attempted to do for decades in a largely self-contained, controlled environment. Just take a look at the discussions among LibraryThingers via the LibraryThing blog or the Google Group devoted to discussing LibraryThing to get some idea of how this capability is playing out. Like I stated earlier, it is not just cool and useful, it is chaotic by its very nature.

I’ve spent several hours lately, trying to pull together disparate bibliographic entries in LibraryThing using this new capability. I’ve only done some authors and left others alone. I’ve made a few mistakes but by and large, I think I’ve managed to contribute some useful work. Authors I’ve worked on include Herge (author of the Tintin series), P.D. James, and Frank Peretti.

It is a bit strange, as a former cataloging manager and serials cataloger in a large academic library, to be doing this. But it’s gratifying, too, and in many ways, that’s the point.
I think we are only just beginning to understand the ramifications of this kind of user-level, user-controlled interaction with bibliographic data (and data that is not necessarily or purely MARC-based). Some of the issues that have already arisen include whether or not to combine all language editions of a work together, authority control, how to handle editors vs. authors, and so on. All of these things have solutions or at least have been discussed for forever among professional catalogers and it is quite interesting to see how the discussion is going among a group that is largely made up of “self-proclaimed” catalogers. As Tim calls it, “Everyone’s a librarian.” Interesting stuff.

Keeping track of books I’ve read

Posted on by
3

I’ve mentioned before how much I like LibraryThing, one of the best Web 2.0 type services anywhere. Yesterday I decided to use it to begin tracking the books I’ve read recently. I started using the tag ‘read’ and then used the handy blog widget LibraryThing provides to create a feed of those books tagged as ‘read’. You can see the most recent five books I’ve read in the sidebar of this blog. So if you really care to know, you can check up on what I’ve been reading. You will see that I have been reading a lot of mysteries, especially historical mysteries. I go through phases of different tastes and sometimes I don’t feel inclined to read much at all, but lately, I have enjoyed finding and reading books by authors whom I’ve never read before. Once the children are finally tucked into bed at night, or when I’m on the train going to and from work, it is great to just sit and read a good book!

A side benefit of starting to keep track of books I’ve read via LibraryThing is finding out how many I actually read in the course of a year, something I’ve never done before.

LibraryThing and RSS/HTML feeds

Posted on by
Reply

I was happy to see an announcement today from Tim Spalding, creator/maintainer of LibraryThing, about the availability of RSS/HTML feeds. Tim’s work in developing a library community centered around a shared online catalog of user’s books is one of the standout ideas/creations of the past year. He is very responsive to user input and more than that, is able to grasp and see bigger uses for this new kind of service. He is constantly upgrading and adding in new features. I use this service and think that “regular” libraries can learn a lot from LibraryThing’s development. The only negative I can see at this point to his work is a small, nitpicky dislike of the inability to normalize or remove initial articles from book titles for searching purposes, so that, for example, “A celebration of London: Walks around the capital” sorts alphabetically with As rather than Cs.

Questions about tagging

Posted on by
2

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but I have been experimenting for a while now with tagging my posts using Technorati tags. I’ve settled on using Flock as my preferred blogging platform, at least in part because of the ease with which I can associate tags and categories with each post. (By the way, I also love the way that I can use Flock to access my Flickr account and associate tags with my photos and/or quickly insert them into blog postings.) I’ve mentioned in the past that I am somewhat dubious about tagging, but I also can see some of its benefits from the user perspective. The jury is still out. In the meantime, I have some tagging questions that are nagging me. Maybe I am simply exhibiting the anal retentive stereotype of someone with a library cataloging background, who knows?!

  1. Does it matter that there is frequent divergence in how others are tagging the same concept or entity? I’m not even talking about using different (more specific or more general) words. Even when we use the same terms, we can input them in different ways. To illustrate, here is one recent example I’ve come across: “library 2.0″ (what I’ve used) vs. “library2.0″ (notice that lack of a space in between “library” and “2.0″). Then there is the use of capitalization or lack thereof. E.g. “Library 2.0″ vs. “library 2.0″. I don’t view this as mattering that much, but it may matter in certain situations.
  2. I love the concept of developing a tag cloud, and am intrigued by the work of some to tie this into the library online catalog. See, e.g., the work being done at the University Libraries at George Mason University using subject headings extracted from a Voyager system. This is just one example; there are many others. What I am not clear on, though, is whether this is really the answer or solution to the inherent disparity in tags used by different people. Does this disparity not really matter? Of course, there has always been disparity in library cataloging, even when using subject thesauri like LCSH.
  3. It seems that different services develop their own sets of tags. E.g. there are Technorati tags, del.icio.us tags, Flickr tags, and even LibraryThing tags. It seems logical to think about über tags, that allow the user to map between disparate systems. Is that (or would that be) beneficial? A sort of Dublin Core for the tagging world? Is anyone developing something like this or even thinking about it, or am I way off?

There are other niggly things that I can’t think of right now, but if I can remember them later, I’ll jot them down and ask about them in a separate post.

Interview with LibraryThing creator and thoughts on techie backgrounds

Posted on by
Reply

I saw a link to an interview with Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing, via Library Stuff. The interview itself is available at Emily Chang’s eHub. LibraryThing continues to be one of my all time favorite sites, even though I haven’t had time lately to devote to it. Upon first look, I quickly bought a lifetime membership because I liked what I saw and wanted to support and use it regularly.

In the interview, Tim mentions that his hardcore support comes from book lovers, academics, librarians — those sorts of people. That means I’m in good company as a librarian and technogeek ;-)

One of the things that most stood out to me in the interview was the fact that although Tim is obviously very tech savvy and works with computers for a living, he does not have an academic background in computer science. Instead, he apparently studied Classics. I find this very interesting. My observation over the years is that there a lot of people in the computer world who have gone through computer science curricula or who have extensive, formal training in computer stuff. Then there is a huge group of others who tend to have a humanities background that does not include much, if any, formal computer science education. This latter group has largely learned the techie stuff on its own. Some of the brightest and best people I’ve known in terms of their computer knowledge have no formal compute education. I happen to fall into this category, too (not of the best and brightest, just the fact that I have no educational background in computer science, yet I work with designing software for libraries). My background is in history and German, with a graduate degree in library and information science. The latter degree had certain technological requirements and I had one programming class as part of completing the degree, however, the emphasis back when I was in library school was most certainly on libraries, still, not so much on the information science aspect like it is today. And frankly that was the way I wanted it (and still do).

So…if you’re interested in working with computers, should you pursue the formal computer science type of education, or should you just learn it on your own or by experience? I don’t know which is better; I just find it interesting (and beneficial) that there is a diversity of backgrounds in the techie world.

My profile on LibraryThing

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been using LibraryThing off and on for the last week and added a small portion of the books in my personal library to it. Steven Cohen at Library Stuff quotes another LibraryThing user as saying that the social aspect of LibraryThing is what makes it so addictive. I agree. It is quite interesting to see how this project develops and expands. The guy who created it obviously put a lot of thought and care into with a lot of handy features. One negative I have experienced is that it is difficult to view or make sense out of different editions of works (an age-old library online catalog problem). This is particularly noticeable the larger the catalog gets (the more books that are added). I need to look at the interface more carefully to see if there are ways to cope with this problem, but my initial thought is, why wasn’t FRBR utilized wouldn’t it be great if the catalog interface was FRBRized? Searching the existing catalog can get me frustrated pretty quickly. I may be missing something obvious, though.