5. Scanning the Shelves of LibraryThing

One of my fantasies (okay, I have really boring fantasies) is to have a home catalogue of all my books, which seem to number roughly 2,500. This fantasy also envisions the catalogue as being housed in a nice wooden case, next to a big cushy chair and hassock with the requisite cat. But a LibraryThing sort of catalogue seems a lot more realistic, so I eagerly set about entering some of my owned titles. I did about a dozen before my mouse hand protested. At a rate of 12 per day, I could whip through those 2,500 books in roughly seven months. About 353 months faster than I’ve whipped through my drawer full of un-albumed photos. Still, that little Cue Cat scanner LibraryThing advertises for $15 is looking verrry attractive.

Avoiding Amazon because of some of the LibraryThing cautions, I used the Library of Congress to set up my book list, but found some of my newer titles aren’t in it and some of my older ones are represented only by newer editions, so without spending more time perfecting the entries, my book list is only an approximation of what I have.

Then there’s tagging. After I had done a few, I thought what I really need to do is tag my books with location, e.g., second shelf of the tall bookshelf in the basement behind the videos we really should get rid of already, or with where, when or why I got the book. I’m sure folks would appreciate my sharing that useful info with them. . .

Speaking of sharing, to put my Random Book Generator Widget on the blog I had to make public my list. Does all this sharing influence what books people include and how they tag them? Is that a good thing?


On entering some old and odd titles I was pleased to find that other LibraryThingers had them on their lists, too. Other social aspects of the site I found less than useful; the reviews were numerous and fairly tedious. For testing purposes I plugged in “Atonement,” hoping to find someone else who had a violent reaction to it. (I fumed for days, since in my view the author had violated an unwritten contract with the reader not to be totally deceitful.) But no one else, on a scan of reviews, seemed very passionate about it, and the setup doesn’t really encourage true discussions.

For library purposes, I might want to enter different lists, say, storytime favorites, or the best of the new biographies, but am not sure if that requires separate accounts. The Thing could also be a good spot to share lists of books for displays, or to compile subject-area lists for homeschoolers, or to put up the summer reading lists, or to encourage the home-bound to trade their favorites with other shut-ins in the county. Teens might be encouraged to read and comment on books if a few friends shared their lists, or worked from one posted by librarians.

The LibraryThing lists could include some useful movie-ratings-like information, alerting patrons to explicit sex scenes or gratuitous violence, for instance, so they can avoid what might disturb them -- or zero in on what they like. I would recommend Louise Erdrich’s “Plague of Doves,” for example, but caution that it includes some graphic descriptions.

With all the reader covers now available, the library’s catalogue could fill in some of the blanks in the OPAC. The lists of top authors and books were intriguing and might be a source both for building the collection and choosing titles for in-library group discussions.

Surf's Up: Riding the RSS Wave

In checking my RSS feeds yesterday I found a story linking to a blog perhaps you all are aware of but I hadn't read before, RSS4Lib.com. Described as "something of a mix between a clearinghouse of novel uses of RSS and a place to brainstorm new ideas," it was begun in 2005 by Ken Varnum, a librarian at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The blog is full of fascinating and useful information. If you're trying to explain RSS feeds to patrons, his post titled "RSS: The Shipping Container of the Internet" supplies a good analogy.

But the reason I started to write this is to point out Varnum's latest post, on putting a Creative Commons license in your RSS feed. An earlier post talks about Creative Commons licenses for blogs, something I hadn't thought about since this is such an in-house exercise. All the copyright issues that blogs and other 2.0 uses are raising deserve far more study than I have been able to give them. Licensing these 2.0 blogs and their RSS feeds also is worth exploring.

All of which helps explain why I seem to keep getting sidetracked from coming to some intelligent conclusions about LibraryThing. I also keep printing blogs out on paper so I can refer back to them. Perhaps it's time to explore Diigo or some other Web annotating tool. Or maybe it's time to fold the laundry.

4. The Gluttony of RSS Feeds

I’d been looking forward to this Explo because I long thought a feed reader would help remind me to check various useful Web sites and streamline the process of doing so. After a couple of frustrating hours of fiddling with Google Reader, I’m not so sure, but oooh boy! if I don’t like that RSS reader, all I have to do is figure out which of the roughly 5,432,000 other ones to try next.

(Here are just a couple of useful lists of other reader/feeders, one from the Howard County library site mentioned on the 2.0 blog and the other found by Mr. MacGeek, my personal disparager of all things Microsoft.)

Setting up my reader was time-consuming but Really Simple. Going through the feeds is tedious, and trying to incorporate feeder links in this blog defeated me. I chose Google for two reasons: to avoid having to remember another username/password, and because it is portable and I don’t have to download it onto a computer that does not belong to me. I dislike it because I have to sign in to use it and — what with Google data-mining and my general leeriness of World Wide Web exposure of even my most quotidian doings — because they’re all into making it yet another happy little element of my social network instead of a truly useful professional tool. Happy to "share" my links, folks, but just ask me in person.

Mr. Mac has a downloaded RSS program, NetNewsWire, that he’s pleased with and that based on a brief look is a lot cleaner and easier to navigate than the aforementioned Google product. It also seemed to have less promotional junk on it: One of Google’s lists of bundled feeds for the lazy Feeder Reader (go to Discover link next to add subscription, then click browse), for example, is "Google-related" feeds; NetNewsWire, on the other hand, has a brilliant compilation of far more topics on its sites list. I lifted, painstakingly, one by one, its library-related feeds and put them on my Google Reader. I now am happily browsing them. Fortunately, or un-, said sites are leading me to other stories and other sites, and pretty soon, brain warp sets in.

One thing I found in all that linking and burrowing was Librarian.net, which had a new post on Flickr Commons. The Librarian.net blogger, Jessamyn West of Vermont, noted that one of the Commons participants, Powerhouse Museum, reports: "In the first 4 weeks of the Commons we had more views of the photos than . . . in the entirety of last year on our own website." They also are pleased with the quality of the information supplied by online viewers of the photos, so perhaps this crowd-sourced captioning is a valuable tool for historical research.

Ahem. Back to RSS. The Howard County library site has a number of good uses for them and might serve as a model. Feeding patrons updates on new materials and programs is the most obvious. Based on my venture into feeder/readers, perhaps the most useful thing librarians can do is provide patrons with basic guidance on the differences among all the options, since selection of the most useful program may be the hardest part of all.

I intend to keep my Google Reader (in part because I tried to quit it and found I could only do that if I quit Blogger, too) but basically it will serve as a place to stash all my library-related links. Glorified bookmarking, in other words.

Of Elves and Illustrators

"Einstein said that time is like a river, it flows in bends. If we could only step back around the turns, we could travel in either direction. I’m sure it’s possible. When I die, I’m going right back to the 1830s."
-- Tasha Tudor

In case other people didn’t notice the obituary, artist Tasha Tudor died at the age of 92 on June 18. She was my mother’s favorite children’s book illustrator, and coincidentally lived in the same small Vermont town as my daughter does. I would post a small sample of her work, or a picture of her in her stunning garden, but everything on the family Web site is copyrighted to a faretheewell.

Tudor’s death reminded me of other illustrators and authors who I had thought must surely have died years since because I had enjoyed their work when I was a small child, long ago and far away.

Top of my list is Garth Williams (1912-1996), widely known for Charlotte’s Web and the Little House books, but to me for possibly my favorite book ever, The Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies. It was first published in 1951 and I must have gotten my copy a few years later. It is held together with massive amounts of tape. So I was thrilled to serendipitously find that Random House is bringing the book back out in hardcover on Sept. 9 ($19.99).

Others who seem so attached to an earlier and marvelously simpler time that it hardly seems possible their lives spanned the century are P.L. Travers (1899-1996), Mary Norton (1903-1992), Barbara Cooney (1917-2000), Beatrice Schenck de Regniers (1914-2000) and Bill Peet (1915-2002), master of the crayon. I also discovered a Flickr fan group devoted to vintage children's books, so I am killing two Things with one post.

"Media: Tweets, Blogs and Leaves"

"Every four years seems to usher in new ways for the media to cover the presidential nominating conventions and, in response, new ways that party operatives seek to control their message. . . .
So what’s it going to be this time around? I think I can answer that in 140 characters or less: Twitter."

-- Elizabeth Wasserman, CQ

Saw that headline and couldn't resist sharing. The article discusses some pros and cons of journalistic Twittering.

3. Flickring Images

My exploration of Flickr is somewhat limited since I still take pictures on a 35mm camera and don't always get CDs of them either. Having not organized my shoebox full of pictures in 30-odd years I have little hope I'd be more efficient with a slew of downloaded images. So I approached Flickr as a browser/researcher, not a photographer/sharer.

I looked at some of the library groups; the ones I checked out were not very inspired. So I searched wildflower groups and found some terrific pictures under Wildlife and Nature of DelMarVa, but they were more animals than flora. I tried to take a closer look at one of a bear cub in a tree by clicking on that and got sent off to the photographer's collections, which were excellent, but I didn't find the bear cub. So I typed in "wildflowers maryland" under Photos and found beautiful pictures. Many of these are better than what is on native plant Web sites (see the rail on this blog), though they often lack the species names.

Flickr might be a good place to check when helping patrons with research on animals, plants, places (lighthouses! -- another interesting page was the annotated map of Great Lakes lighthouses in the Flickr tour). As for library uses, it would be fun to have the county map on Flickr with photos of the buildings popping up when you click on the branch locations. Literary tours or picture-annotated maps of (dead) authors' homes could also prove useful and entertaining, particularly for those planning to travel. (For example, a friend once did a Little House vacation, visiting all the Laura Ingalls Wilder homeplaces.)

Following the Library of Congress model mentioned on the Explorations blog also would be a terrific way to crowd-source information for local history buffs. Invite patrons to bring their old pictures in for the library to post on Flickr, and solicit comments and caption information. Perhaps the group could be limited to those with library cards if people are nervous about opening up to the larger world. On uploading pix of library events, the people in the pictures should be given releases to sign, particularly if their names are attached. In using photo-sharing sites, the library and individuals also should keep in mind commercial uses/abuses of personal photos, as this cautionary story in The Washington Post pointed out.

I do wonder with the Library of Congress and other crowd-sourced efforts, who verifies the facts? Is that just left for the historians to eventually sort out? What is the responsibility of a library to disseminate knowledge and not simply memories or conjecture?

Oh, and I found the bear cub again by searching the pool for "bear." Here it is. For some reason that search also brought up a raccoon picture. Tagging doesn't seem to be an exact science.

News Bits

• National Archives and Records Administration is now a founding partner in the World Digital Library, set to launch early next year, the Library of Congress announced in July. Digital versions of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Civil War photographs and more of the Archives' contributions are already available online.
• Haven't reached this part of the Exploration yet but came across the news that a new Twitter feature has been launched called Phweet. I'm sure this is totally awesome, but still pondering how it might be better than using the telephone. TechCrunch comments, "The whole thing appears to be free. Phweet plans to add more social networks and the Phweet API is going to encourage application developers to come up with new apps."
• In case you missed the launch of knol, Google's new smart people posting site, here's the link to the news release.