LibraryThing for Libraries - Nelson Public Libraries

Nelson Public Libraries, April 2009

LibraryThing for Libraries Presented by Ale š Vanek

“ LibraryThing = a social online product that feeds our mania for books, our joy in talking about authors and stories, and our need to share with others.” [Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing] New terms are emerging, e.g. Folksonomy - also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging; the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. (source Wikipedia)

LibraryThing - Overview

What could LibraryThing for Libraries mean to us?

LibraryThing enriches Nelson Public Libraries online catalogue

with the power and fun of Library 2.0 technologies!

Scope:

New content (recommendations, tag clouds, and read/write reviews ).

Let our users interact but we keep the control.

Results drawn on the collective intelligence of our catalogue users and LibraryThing members.

The cost - what we pay for?

1. Reviews Enhancement package

2. Catalogue Enhancements package

Reviews Enhancement package

Borrowers reviews. Our catalogue users can rate and review without surfing somewhere else. This module comes with 200,000+ (high-quality) reviews from LibraryThing.com

Widgets. Users can show off reviews and their library with library-branded "blog widgets" and a Facebook application.

Catalogue Enhancements package

This provides more valuable data for each book, and more points for searching. All of the search information - recommended titles, similar editions, tag search results - relate back to what can be found in our OPAC .

Book recommendations. High-quality "recommended" or "similar" books, like reader's advisory that points to books available in our library .

Tag-based discovery. Tag clouds for books, and tag-based search and discovery, drawn from the 41 million tags added by LibraryThing members.

Other editions and translations. Provides links to bib pages of other editions and translations of a work that can be found an your library.

Implementation process – to be the first library in New Zealand…

Step one: sending LibraryThing our data.

a new account has been set up.

ISBNs extracted -> Export title and author information in tab-delimited format -> LibraryThing.com does the rest.

Step two: Pasting the <HTML code>

Adding lines of HTML to our catalog templates.

Each LibraryThing for Libraries “widget” is customizable.

Nelson Public Libraries control how it works and how it looks.

Step three: Testing and going LIVE!

Testing out LibraryThing without our patrons noticing any changes. Adjusting configuration files to our needs.

Turn it on - Turn if off – by moduls - anytime

LibraryThing – user’s view

LibraryThing – Tag browser

Running up the system

Overlap

is the percentage of books that our library and LibraryThing have in common (in March 2008, the average is around 65%).

Running up the system - stats

Notes

Recommendations. This is the number and percentage of pages that LTFL enhanced with recommendations.

Other editions. This is the number and percentage of pages that LTFL enhanced with other editions.

Tags. This is the number and percentage of pages that LTFL enhanced with a tag cloud.

Reviews. This is the number and percentage of pages LTFL enhanced with reviews.

Tags clicked. This is the number of times users have clicked on a tag in a tag cloud.

Tags per popup. Sometimes users will browse around in the tag browser, clicking on related tags. This counts the average number of times they did so.

Review links clicked How many times users looked at the reviews.

Reviews submitted How many reviews have been submitted by your library.

Recommendations browse. This counts the number and percentage of times that a patron *follows* a recommended book link by clicking on the link.

Editions browse. This counts how often patrons follow an "other editions" link.

Tag browse. This counts how often a patron clicked on a tag in a tag cloud to pull up the tag browser.

LibraryThing – reviews workflow

Notes

a Reviewer clicks on the reviews link on the bib page to see reviews. They have to create a login and password (email optional, but the only way to retrieve a lost password). Once they're logged in, they see a text box for a review, and a place to click for star rating. They enter their review or rating, and hit ‘Save’.

LibraryThing – reviews workflow cont.

Notes – Reviewer –> Moderator -> Approval/Rejection

Once a review is accepted, it will be visible in our OPAC.

If the moderator rejects it, the patron will continue to see the review when they're logged in, but no one else will see it.

On the moderation page you can also see previously accepted and denied reviews and change them if you'd like.

All reviews that come from other libraries are moderated by librarians at the home library.

anybody currently Annette, Anna, you?

LibraryThing – what’s next?

Fancy LibraryThing widgets?

surf to LibraryThing books from Nelson Public Libraries website

search widget on the blog

perhaps having LibraryThing

on your cell phone?

Reviews at My Library on Facebook - a way for you to show the reviews you've written.

LibraryThing – Q&A

There is a tag that is unrelated to the item.

For this, we have to contact librarything.com staff.

There is a weird book recommendation. How can we fix it?

Sometimes, if a book isn't terribly popular, the items that will show up as recommendations will be based on minimal data. We can go into our account, into the configuration tab, and change the "drop risky recommendations?" from "show all recommendations" to "drop only the riskiest recommendations".

There are other editions showing up that are incorrect.

Occasionally, this is due to the re-use of an ISBN by publishers. This can be fixed.

I used my LibraryThing account to tag a book. Why won't the tag show up in my OPAC?

Tags are filtered, and analyzed what kind of tags a book has. Example: many people have tagged Harry Potter books as 'fiction' or 'magic'. Because people get to tag books with whatever they want, a book might have personal tags like 'blue shelf second row', or straight-up wrong tags like 'computer science'. By using popularity as an indicator at how 'right' the tags are, a lot of highly personal tags is filtered. So, for books in LTFL libraries to have new tags show up, the work must have a number of people who have all tagged it the same.