- 450,000 registered users
- 28 million books
- 37 million tags
- 50+ imitators
- LibraryThing is your friend 🙂
LibraryThing use often follows the pattern:
- Personal cataloging
- Social networking
- Social Cataloging
Social cataloging happens in both implicit and explicit ways.
Using examples of ‘Thomas Jefferson‘ and other famous users – where their library collections have been added to LibraryThing
LibraryThing has ‘common knowledge’ fields – things such as characters etc.
A page such as http://www.librarything.com/series/Star+Wars contains more knowledge about the Star Wars series of books than anywhere else in the world.
Showing the power of librarything – tags, bringing together editions etc.
The ‘tag war’ is over. Tim does not believe tags are ‘better’ than subjects – but tags are just great for finding stuff. If you care about finding stuff not asserting ontological reality – then tags are great – you just have to spend some time using them to see this.
The physical basis of classification:
- A book has 3-6 subject (‘cos that what fits on a card)
- Subjects are equally true (can’t express degrees of relation to a subject – either a book is about it or not – black and white)
- Subjects never change (once subjects are allocated you don’t go back – even if terminology changes on in the real world)
- Only librarians get to add subjects
- There is only one answer – someone ‘wins’
- You don’t get a say in how books are classified – you don’t want users writing on the cards – but not relevant in virtual environment
- Only books are cataloged
- Cataloging has to be done in the library
- Most librarian can’t help you, each other, themselves
- Libraries are NOT good at sharing metadata (contradicting Jennifer) – we tend to pull down records from a central source – very few libraries push back
- Record creating and editing can’t be distribute
- Record sharing can’t be shared freely
Two futures:
- The world ends
- You (catalogers) are paid less
- Programmers still get paid
- You move up the stack
- An IT-industry analogy – with open source software
- Demand increasing
- Low leve work and data becomes commoditized, distributed, free
- You move higher, get paid more
Tim wants a new shelf order:
- Replaces Dewey
- Free (Open Source)
- Modern
- Humble – not trying to model the whole world
- Decided socially, level by level
- Tested against the world
- Assignment is distributed
- I write the code
- You (cataloguers) be Jimmy Wales (audience asked – who is Jimmy Wales – one of the founders of wikipedia) – look over it, but has no power!