LibraryThing for Libraries - Nelson Public Libraries

Nelson Public Libraries, April 2009
LibraryThing for Libraries
Presented by Aleš 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

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.
• There is a tag that is unrelated to the item
For this, we will contact librarything.com staff.
Any question? Ask now or email ales.vanek@ncc.govt.nz

LibraryThing for Libraries - Nelson Public Libraries

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LibraryThing for Libraries - Nelson Public Libraries