Library Anywhere write-up on ALA TechSource blog

Library Anywhere, our upcoming product that provides a mobile catalog (both mobile web and native apps) for any library, just got an excellent write-up on the ALA TechSource blog: LibraryThing Delivers Mobile Access to Library Catalogs.

The article, by Marshall Breeding, will also appear in the March 2010 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter.

Breeding says of Library Anywhere,

"With the high level of functionality and the low pricing, this competition will lower the threshold for mobile technology into the reach of almost any library."

We're certainly excited about Library Anywhere, and are busy at work on it. We'll have more to show off soon!

400,000 LTFL Reviews

We now have over 400,000 reviews vetted and available for LibraryThing for Libraries. (Last June we hit 300,000, so over 100,000 reviews have been added in the past 8 months—not bad.)

400,000 is a lot of reviews. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, for example, has 117 reviews. Now you probably don't need to read over 100 reviews. But if a popular book gets that many, then the more obscure books in your catalog could have 20, 10, or 5 reviews. LTFL reviews cover the bestsellers but they also reach down the long tail.

The LTFL Reviews Enhancement also comes with blog widgets and a Facebook application allow your patrons to show off their reviews—and their love for your library—where they "live" online.

The Reviews Enhancement is currently available for Horizon, iBistro, Webvoyage, Voyager 7, Koha, Evergreen, WebPac, WebPac Pro, and Polaris 3.6. We're always expanding this list, so if your OPAC isn't one of these, email abby@librarything.com and we can work on adding support for it.

For more information, email me (abby@librarything.com). For ordering information, contact Peder Christensen at Bowker—877-340-2400 or Peder.Christensen@bowker.com.

Tasmanian radio interview and talk

John Dalton, our man in Australia, did a snappy 12-minute radio interview for ABC Hobart show "Afternoons" with Michael Veitch. (Apparently, although John's thousands of miles away from the rest of us, and working from home, he doesn't get to "bludge around" very much.)

Here's a link to a recording: recording

The appearance was related to the State Library of Tasmania, a long-time LibraryThing for Libraries member, adding our "Reviews" enhancement, and public talk John is giving on Wednesday at the State Library in Hobart tomorrow, Wednesday at 4:00pm.

More on the talk here.

An example book at the State Library, with reviews, here.

Shelf Browse live at High Plains

Shelf Browse—which we announced last week—is now live in High Plains Library District's catalog. As we mentioned in our brief ALA announcement, Shelf Browse lets you browse your library's shelves visually, just as you would do in the physical library.

Shelf Browse lets your patrons see where a book sits on your actual shelves, and what's near it. It includes a "mini-browser" that sits on your detail pages, and a full-screen version, launched from the detail page.

See it in action at High Plains Library District. Some jumping off points:

• The Moosewood Cookbook
• Almost French : love and a new life in Paris
• A history of the world in 6 glasses
• American Gods

Scroll back and forth, serendipitously browsing through the shelves. If lists are more your speed, in the full-screen version, you can switch between shelf and list mode.

For ordering information contact Peder Christensen at Bowker—toll-free at 877-340-2400 or email Peder.Christensen@bowker.com.

Library Anywhere Prices (Public!)

As we announced last week at ALA Midwinter, we're about to come out with "Library Anywhere"—a mobile catalog for any library. In short, it provides a mobile catalog, both mobile web and native apps (see the handout).

Price List. We promised that Library Anywhere wouldn't just be cheap, but that we would have published prices. This is a pretty big deal in the library world, where wiggly, negotiable prices and hidden formulae are the norm.

LibraryThing Anywhere Price List!

We key off buildings and locations, to be as dead-simple as possible. It's an annual subscription fee.

Schools
$150, plus $50 for each additional location

Public libraries
$350 for main library, plus $50 per branch

Two and four-year colleges
$750, plus $150 for each additional library building

Universities
$1,000, plus $150 for each additional library building

We're confident this is 1/4 to 1/2 the price of our competition. This makes us very happy. It should also be a good deal better.

Beta Libraries Wanted. We're still looking for beta libraries, especially for some systems. Contact abby@librarything.com if interested.

For ordering information contact Peder Christensen at Bowker—toll-free at 877-340-2400 or email Peder.Christensen@bowker.com.

New stuff: Shelf Browse

If you're at the American Library Association in Boston, come check us out (booth 1208).

We're going to be showing a bunch of new products. First up is "Shelf Browse," another enhancement for LibraryThing for Libraries.



As our ALA handout (available here) puts it:

"Browse your library’s shelves visually, just as you would do in the physical library. Shelf Browse lets your patrons see where a book sits on your actual shelves, and what’s near it. It includes a “mini-browser” that sits on your detail pages, and a full-screen version, launched from the detail page.

LibraryThing at ALA Midwinter

We're at ALA Midwinter in Boston this weekend—come by and talk to us! We're in booth 1208 (look for the rhinos).

We'll be showing off LibraryThing for Libraries—reviews, tags, recommendations and some big new features.

New features

• Shelf Browse for your OPAC. It shows your covers on a virtual "shelf" for browsing—just as you would do in the physical library. Shelf Browse lets you see where a book sits on your actual shelves, and what's near it.


• Library Anywhere: A mobile catalog for everyone. Library Anywhere gives you a web version of your OPAC optimized for cell phones, as well as native applications for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. It requires no installation, and will be cheap.


• Scoping for Consortia. LTFL now has improved consortium support which allows for "scoping"—patrons searching within a scoped location will only see, for example, LTFL recommending books that are held at that location.

This is just a quick overview, we'll blog each of these in much more depth in a few days, stay tuned for more details and screenshots. Or just stop by the booth and we'll show everything to you in action.

Party
Saturday after the show, come have some baked brie and talk books and libraries with us.

• Saturday the 16th, 5:30-8pm at The Green Dragon Tavern.

Appetizers, drinks, and good conversation. Details in this blog post. We'll also have little cards with directions at the booth.

Free exhibit passes
If you just want to go to the exhibit hall (no sessions), you can get a free pass here.

ALA Midwinter—free exhibit passes

We'll be at ALA Midwinter this weekend, and so should you! We have free passes to give out (to the exhibits only) if anyone in the Boston area wants to attend.

You just have to go here and register.

While you're there, stop by to say hi. We'll be in booth 1208—just look for the rhinos.

More announcements coming soon, including a few new LibraryThing for Libraries features, and an update on the party we're hosting Saturday evening. Stay tuned.

1,512 libraries in LibraryThing for Libraries

LibraryThing for Libraries, our enhancements to public and academic library catalogs, continues to advance. The official list shows some 159 "libraries" getting our tags, recommendations and reviews in their catalogs. But many of those 159 "libraries" are really much larger systems.

So, we thought we'd figure out how many individual libraries were using LibraryThing for Libraries, and add them all to LibraryThing Local. It wasn't until we started searching out every member library of every consortium and adding every branch to LibraryThing Local that we realized we had WAY more libraries than we had thought: 1,512!

Some of the biggies include ALS/RSA in Illinois, with over 250 member libraries, NOBLE in Massachusetts, with 28, and the King County Library System in Washington, with 43. Over in Australia, the State Library of Tasmania pretty much covers the island, with some 50 libraries.

LTFL in LibraryThing Local. To get this number, we had to add all the libraries to LibraryThing Local. All LibraryThing for Libraries members get this badge:



We have some other plans for this, of course. But for now we're going to sit back—and dream about an around-the-world trip to visit all of them...

LTFL: now available for Evergreen

We've been working on adding the LibraryThing for Libraries enhancements to the open-source catalog Evergreen. We've worked out the kinks, and it's ready to roll.

We've integrated both the Catalog Enhancements (tags, tag browser, recommendations, other editions and translations) and the Reviews Enhancement (300,000 LibraryThing reviews, patron reviewing, Facebook app, blog widgets).

If you'd like to see how LTFL looks, check out the catalog of Kent County, Maryland. We owe them a thousand thanks for working with us on making this work.

LTFL: Non-ISBN Matching

Short Story. We've been going through so many big changes at LibraryThing lately that we let a pretty substantial improvement go by without giving it the fanfare it deserves: the LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL) Cataloging Enhancements now pick up many non-ISBN items. All LibraryThing for Libraries libraries will see better coverage (5-15%), and academic libraries with older materials should be especially pleased:

Some examples:

• An 1819 edition of Don Quixote, in Spanish at Bowdoin College
• A 1952 edition of Tom Jones from King County Library System
• A cassette audio recording of Great Expectations from the Great River Regional Library
  

The coolest thing about the LibraryThing office: Need a photo of an old book? Grab iphone, swivel chair 180 degrees and shoot. Second coolest thing: The only hot Web 2.0 company with a 1774 edition of Terence.

Long Story. Our enhancements usually run on the basis of the ISBN. ISBNs are easy to pick out of the HTML without knowing the structure of the page ( /[0-9Xx]{10,13}/*, if you speak regular expressions*), and most books have them, so they're our primary way of knowing what content to load for a particular page.

However, as a part of our reviews enhancement, we developed a JavaScript library called the LibraryThing Connector that, among other things, screen-scrapes the title and author of the book out of the HTML. This is what allows our reviews to work on any item a library owns, whether or not it is in LibraryThing or has an ISBN. It's tricky stuff, because it requires specific code for every type of library software that we provide reviews for.

To get title-matching therefore, we take the title and author extracted by the Connector and feed it to our own "What Work" fuzzy matching API. Of course, this method is far from foolproof, so we err on the side of caution, only loading enhancement data if we've got a strong match on both the title and the author. We haven't seen any false positives yet, but even with being pretty strict about matching, based on real world stats, we're able to provide around 5-15% more content in the catalog. Academic libraries will get more of a boost out of this, because they tend to have a lot more non-ISBN items than public libraries.

We did this because it's fun and useful and kind of magic, but more importantly because we want to constantly improve our products. LibraryThing for Libraries is a subscription service. Every year when it is time for a library to renew with us, we want it to be clear that they're getting something better from us than they were a year ago, and that even better things are in store for the future. It's more fun and challenging for us that way, but it's also something we know works pretty well as a business strategy too.

In my mind a big reason why LibraryThing.com has succeeded is that a membership comes with an expectation of improvement. We don't call a membership an investment, but you get to expect that you will be able to do more and better and cooler things with LibraryThing over time, and that it will become more valuable to you. As a result of this, our members become deeply involved in the site and how it works, and if a LibraryThing membership is a great investment, members end up making an even greater investment of their knowledge and enthusiasm right back. It's a great thing to be a part of, so I hope it's a philosophy we can keep bringing to the library world as well. — Casey

*Pace Casey, who wrote this post, ISBNs are/([0-9]{9}[0-9X}|97[89][0-9]{10})/i !

LibraryThing for Libraries at ALA: new features and hungry rhinos

Are you ready for this?

Tim and I will be at the American Library Association's annual conference this year. We have new, new LTFL features to show off. You can find us at booth 2857 in the exhibit hall.

1. New features! We'll be demoing our new catalog enhancers - never before seen by librarians. We'll post an announcement all about the new features in a day or two.

2. An art installation! Yeah, you'll just have to wait and see it. I can't even describe it, other than to say that it takes away ennui.

3. More rhinos! Tim and I are both flying to Chicago with an inflatable rhino in our luggage. We plan on playing "Toss the Rhino", and perhaps if we are feeling extra daring, "Pass the Rhinos".

(Thanks to Brixton for the masticating rhino photo. The rhino tossing one's mine. That's Tim and Casey putting some English on the rhino.)

Category Feature Added to LTFL Reviews

We've added a new feature to the LibraryThing for Libraries Reviews Enhancement: the ability to categorize reviews for the blog widget.

Thus far, library patrons have been able to write reviews and rate books in their library's catalog, add their reviews to their Facebook page and even create a widget that lets them show off their reviews on blogs and websites.

Now, libraries can show off reviews written by their patrons for specific library programs. Patrons and librarians can add categories to a review. The library can then create blog widgets with said categories – keep track of reviews for the Summer Reading Program, One Book, One City and book discussion groups.

This should be helpful all year round, but the inspiration for the feature came from a librarian's request to manage the reviews children were going to be writing for the summer reading program at their library. They wanted some way to display the reviews separately from the rest of the reviews coming in.

Anyone who's bought the Reviews Enhancement can use this feature starting immediately. Read here for instructions how to add and use it.

If you'd like more information about LTFL, and the enhancements that can take your OPAC from Library 1.0 to Library 2.0 overnight, fill out the interest form on the LTFL page.

The Reviews Enhancement isn't available for all OPACs – currently, it supports Horizon, iBistro, iLink, eLibrary, Webvoyage, Voyager 7, WebPac, WebPac Pro and Koha. More are coming soon!

LTFL Reviews: you stand 300,000 deep

At the end of May, we reached 300,000 reviews vetted and available for LibraryThing for Libraries!

We'd previously been bragging about having 250,000 reviews, so here's my core sample: at the beginning of April, we had 24 reviews for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Now, we have 74. Of course, popular books will get more reviews, but trust me – we also cover the long, long tail of library collections.


The LTFL Reviews Enhancement is currently available for Horizon, iBistro, Webvoyage, Voyager 7, Koha, WebPac and WebPac Pro. The LTFL Catalog Enhancements are available for practically every OPAC. Contact us for more info.

Improved support for Koha

Setting up LibraryThing for Libraries in Koha is now a only couple of clicks away!

The 3.2 version of Koha (which isn't out yet) will include the improved integration for LTFL. If you are using Koha without a host, and run on the bleeding edge, you can try it now via Git.

What this does is enable and disable LTFL through the Koha Enhanced Content system preference page. Simply enter your LTFL account number (found on your LibraryThing for Libraries Account page), decide where you'd like LTFL content to display (in tabs or under other bibliographic details) and enable it. No need to edit Koha templates.

The work to make this possible was initiated by me and extended and improved by Chris Hyde of East Brunswick Public Library. Thanks, Chris!

LTFL webinar by WiLS

There will be a webinar* on LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL) from Wisconsin Library Services (WiLS).

Details: Thursday April 9th, 2009, 2:00 - 3:00 pm, Central Time
Blog post here | Sign-up info here

Jenny Schmidt (SWITCH consortium) and Ingrid Lebolt (Arlington Heights Memorial Library) will be explaining "how LTFL works and detail the process of implementing LTFL features into your library's catalog (Web Opac)." WiLS hosts a series of webinars for libraries.

Note: this is one in a series of webinars, all which cost smallish amounts of money.

Both speakers work at libraries using LTFL (see the whole list here). I have a long-standing love for the Arlington Heights library. They were an early adopter of LTFL, and of good things in general. Here's their LibraryThing Local page, and a picture of me standing outside their building (to corroborate my story). The far-away half of my family lived there, and I grew up going to AHML when I'd visit.



*definition of 'web conference/webinar'

LibraryThing at Computers In Libraries 2009

LibraryThing, your favorite makers of libraries in computers, will be at Computers in Libraries this week. We'll be passing out free stuff and showing off our new LibraryThing for Libraries feature so if you're at CIL, stop by booth 214 and say hi. Unfortunately, we're rhino-less this time, but we do have T-shirts and laptop stickers (and Tim.)

Our new feature allows our catalog enhancements to run even on items that don't have an ISBN. Check it out in action on this 1948 edition of Tom Jones, or this 1937 edition of David Copperfield

There's no ISBN on those items, but our code is still smart enough to load the right tags and recommendations info. It uses a combination of our new What Work API and the LibraryThing Connector (the JavaScript that powers LTFL) to pull title and author information out of the catalog's HTML and then match it against our system. This new feature should help our academic libraries in particular, since they tend to have a lot of older pre-ISBN books.

Polaris support for LibraryThing for Libraries

Following on yesterday's announcement of Koha support, we're happy to announce that LibraryThing for Libraries catalog enhancements are now available for Polaris OPACs.

First off, we probably owe the Polaris people a public apology for this being such a long time coming. They first contacted me about integrating LTFL in their systems a year and a half ago, when we only had 5 or 6 customers. One of their libraries had asked about it, and as a company, they've decided to be incredibly responsive to the cutting edge things their libraries want to do. They've kept pushing us (on behalf of their customers), even as technical and non-technical obstacles (mostly non-technical) have prevented us from seeing it through.

It's a great corporate philosophy, and far too rare in the library world. Now that everybody takes our phone calls and wants to work with us, they deserve a lot of credit from being down from day one. It's unsurprising to me that they scored among the highest customer satisfaction of any commercial ILS vendor in a recent poll; clearly service is a high priority for them.

Want to see the catalog enhancements in action? Here are a couple of examples from our first Polaris customer to go live, Glendora Public Library: (dogs), (fantasy). Several more Polaris libraries are testng it.

Because of the way Polaris' system works, you currently have to press the LibraryThing button to get the content for a particular item. In the next version of Polaris, not only with LTFL be installable without editing any template files, but there will be no LibraryThing button; our content will load when somebody clicks on the "full display" button. So far, we haven't added review support, but we're happy to do it if there are interested customers.

Currently we have two installation options: the first only requires a single line of code to be added to your templates, but it does the LibraryThing button instead of loading with the details. This is what Glendora is using. The other installation option (provided by an engineer at Polaris) requires more involved editing of their templates but makes the current version of Polaris work with LTFL like the forthcoming version will.

Interested in getting LibraryThing for Libraries for your Polaris catalog? Contact us through the Interested? form.

Koha Support / Introducing Chris Catalfo

LibraryThing for Libraries, our innovative project to put tags, recommendation, reviews and other great enhancements inside the library catalog, now supports Koha.

You can see a quick demo of LibraryThing for Libraries/Koha integration.

The "library" has only seven books and is not as "pretty" as it could be. And there's some question whether to integrate our tags into Koha's tags--sometimes worse, sometimes better. But anyway, the beauty is all underneath—our code brings LibraryThing content into Koha seamlessly and rapidly.

Koha (www.koha.org), is the first and most popular open-source ILS (Integrated Library System). Started in New Zealand, Koha development is a community affair, but it's spearheaded by LibLime in the US. LibLime also provides support services for Koha, and develops other open-source products.

Koha (and LibLime) are emblematic of the positive changes that have been dawning over libraryland. It's hard for technical people outside the library "industry" to imagine how backward library tech generally is—a layered mess of proprietary, stone-age solutions maintained by a dysfunctional relationship between vendors and libraries. Koha stands at the head of efforts to change that.

LibLime's most audacious and hopeful project is not Koha, but ‡Biblios* (‡Biblios.org) and ‡Biblios.net (‡Biblios.net), respectively an open-source cataloging application and an open-data repository of bibliographic records. ‡Biblios was started by Chris Catalfo for the 2007 Google Summer of Code.

In essense, ‡Biblios is an open-source answer to OCLC Connexion, and ‡Biblios.net is an open-data answer to OCLC's WorldCat. LibLime is too politic to state things so clearly, but together ‡Biblios and ‡Biblios.net are a serious challenge to that dysfunctional monopoly. (For background see my OCLC posts; for more on ‡Biblios see this blog post or this LJ article.)

Introducing Chris Catalfo! The Koha integration was done by LibraryThing's newest employee, the aforementioned Chris Catalfo (member: ccatalfo), of ‡Biblios fame.

Chris joins LibraryThing from LibLime. (The two companies are still friends, we promise.) Before LibLime, Chris worked at the Johns Hopkins and UNCW libraries, and got his MLS at North Carolina Central University.** He also has a masters in Italian Literature, and lived in Florence, Italy. (He fits right in at LibraryThing; his favorite book is Historical Linguistics and Language Change!) He now lives in western Connecticut.

Chris is going to be working on LibraryThing for Libraries and on library data issues generally. He's a library-technology nerd par excellence. As he put it to me, "I like library technology so much I put up a Z39.50 server to search my blog." (Try it at chriscatalfo.com:2100/blog.)

The goal in hiring Casey, our first library developer, was to ramp up the library data generally. We did add more sources, and our MARC parsing got better, but we never took full advantage of the data. Casey is working on a number of projects to do just that.

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*‡Biblios presents me, a typography nerd, with a rare opportunity—even necessity—of using the double dagger, or diesis. It gives me real pleasure. Should LibraryThing change its name to ‡LibraryThing?
**Chris is our third full-time MLS-card-carrying librarian; Abby and Sonya also have their MLSs. Abby and Chris both have two masters degrees, the bastards. Giovanni and Chris both speak Italian.

Bowker/CIG news..

Over on the main blog, I wrote a long post about LibraryThing CIG/Bowker deal. It's an excellent deal.

Read the details here.