 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, a webcast, online show, whatever your preference for terminology is. We are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. If you are unable to join us on a Wednesday, that's fine. We do record the show every week, so you can go to our website and watch any of our previous recordings. I'll show you where those are at the end of today's show, where you can see where our archives are. We have the YouTube account recordings for any of the shows, any websites people have mentioned during the show are posted there. If there are any presentations like PowerPoint slides or handouts or documents, we try and collect that all for our archives for watching later. Both the live show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with any of your colleagues that you think may be interested in any of the topics we have here, any of your colleagues, friends, neighbors, family, anybody really who you think something might be of interest to them, send them to our live shows to sign up or to watch any of our recordings that are out there. We do a mixture of things here on the show. Finally our only criteria is that it is something library related, presentations, interviews, book review sessions, mini training sessions, demos of products and services out there. We're really pretty broad. Any types of libraries, big, small, rural, urban, educational, academic, K-12, public, anything. The only criteria I have for this show. We do have some Nebraska library commission staff to come on and do presentations here about things that are going on here in Nebraska or things that are Nebraska-centric, potentially. But we also do bring in guest speakers as we have this morning. On the line with us from the East Coast is Tim Spalding who is the founder and CEO of Library Thing. Good morning, Tim. Hi, how are you doing? Hi. Also, Christy Kennedy who works with Library Thing as well, specifically in this TinyCat program, this service that they have, and we'll get more into that. That's the whole point of the show here. Today's talk about TinyCat. The Library Thing, I'll let you guys talk about that. I actually have my own Library Thing account that I need to update more, but it's been around for quite a long time. I'm just going to hand over to you guys, Tim and Christy, to talk to us about Library Thing and TinyCat. Before you get started, though, I didn't want to know, we had looked at it before, did you guys want to do the webcams? You don't? No. No. You just want the full screen. That's okay. I love the demoing of everything and showing the website. That's perfectly fine. I would love to show my messy hair, but let's not. Exactly. Exactly. Not a problem. All right. So I'll just hand it over to you guys. Yeah. Tell us all about Library Thing and TinyCat. Thanks. Thank you for the introduction. Thanks for the opportunity to be on here. My name is Tim Spalding, and Christy Kennedy is going to be driving, and I'm going to be talking for the beginning of this, and then Christy is going to take over. I am the founder of Library Thing. So let's just start by getting out of the way that you've heard of Library Thing before, probably. It's a site for people to catalog their books, including many libraries. Small libraries have been using it to catalog their books for a long time. TinyCat is a separate product that grows out of Library Thing, and I'm going to be showing you that. Lastly, you may have also heard Library Thing in connection with a product we have called Library Thing for Libraries, and that in turn has become something called Syndetics Unbound, which is distributed by ProQuest, and this is my plug for saying that I'm going to be at ALA hanging out in the ProQuest booth, and I'd love to talk to anyone, have a beer with anyone who was on this as well. Okay. I was wondering about that. I had seen that when I was doing some research looking at things in your site about the whole exchange from Library Thing for Libraries. We do so many things. Yeah, well, we made a joint product, but TinyCat is very much only ours. It's not distributed by ProQuest, and it was programmed entirely by us, so that's what we're going to talk about. So TinyCat is, as it says there, a real library catalog for small libraries for tiny libraries, and Tiny actually means that the library needs to have 20,000 or so items or fewer. So if you're listening from a larger library, this might be the time that you want to leave. However, this is going to be a good option for you to tell people about. In our experience, librarians are always coming to us and saying, my library is larger than this, but we're often being asked by churches and synagogues and historical societies and clubs and other small libraries that I know, and this is an excellent choice for those. So 20,000 items or less, 20,000 records or less, we can push it, but we don't want to be too close to the line. So 20,000, 25,000 in that area. Okay. So TinyCat is a library catalog for small libraries. You can see some of the basic things there, simple, powerful, mobile, rather than giving you some kind of deck, you can find out all about this at the librarycat.org website. There's a little video and so forth that can give you the basics, but let's go a little bit deeper than the basics. So let's go to the next tab if we can, Kristi. So all of this grows out of library things. Library thing was something that I started 11 years ago for regular people to catalog their books. We were actually before Goodreads, but these days I think I have to say we're kind of like Goodreads. The difference is library thing is more library and focused, more catalog focused, a little nerdier. It's a great way to catalog your collection, but it has social aspects as well. So for a long time now, people have been using library thing to catalog small libraries. So you can go ahead, Kristi, and sign into that folio one if you can. Folio is one of the libraries that was cataloging with us. And you can see here what their homepage looks like on library thing. And yeah, Kristi, if you can click on your books, here's a list of the books that they have. This is a library in San Francisco. Now, this is great, but it is not what an OPAC looks like. This is not a link that you want to give to your patrons. This would confuse them. And if we can just click on a book, why don't we just choose like the book of Marjorie Kemp there, the third one. You can see that this is a very good looking, very powerful page about the book, but it has way too much information for a library catalog. And it links you off to all these great social features like seeing other people that have the book and so forth that is way more than a library catalog should present. So for a long time, people were using it to catalog their small libraries, but it wasn't something that you would ever want to give to a patron because it would melt their minds. So yeah, people did actually do this. And then the patrons would click something and they'd find themselves in someone else's catalog. And then they would say, why can't I get this? And the answer is because it's a great big hairy social system and not a library catalog. So let's move on to the next tab and show you TinyCat. TinyCat takes a library thing catalog and takes all the good things of that, like the ability to add books in a very simple, easy way. Library thing is great with mark records, but you don't need mark records even search off of Amazon. Anyone can add books to library thing. It's a very simple system. It takes all of that goodness, but it presents it in the form of a much more traditional, albeit powerful library catalog. So this is the Folio Seattle Athenaeum and this is their homepage. They have a lot of control over this. There's this little bit busy for my tastes, but you can see they've got a moving thing going on there with recent books, books that they choose to highlight. You can change that in various ways. They've also got some subject browsing links above that and some contact info. Let's go ahead and search, though. Let's search for, say, travel within the... Do you want to dive into my own catalog or dive here? Oh, yeah. Well, actually, let's do one or two searches on this. Sorry. Yeah, great. Let's try travel. So you can see here, it comes up very quickly. It's a very fast catalog, much faster, frankly, than catalogs that will cost you $50,000 a year. It's a really fast catalog. It comes up with simple results. You can see here, you can scroll through them. One thing that I think is really cool here is that over on the right, you have full fastening. Fastening is becoming more common, but it's still a feature of really expensive catalogs. But you've got full fastening over on the right. So if we want to see only those travel books that relate to nonfiction, for example, under genre, you can click that, and it will quickly narrow it down for you in that way, give you new facets over there on the right. So it's a really powerful way of getting into a collection quickly and seeing what's there. Let's jump into your catalog, actually, and let's search for, say, Harry Potter. And up come the results very quickly. And this is sort of the point where, Christie might not say this, but I'm going to say this is the programmer. We did everything right. So the reason why it loads so quickly is that it has two JavaScript files instead of 30. Every single page here is exposed to the web. You don't need to pay an extra service to have your library catalog be on the web with permanent URLs rather than these terrible session-based URLs that most library catalogs have. The pages are very slim. The pages are mobile. So, Christie, if you could just take your screen and just drag it to the left. You'll see how everything, resize it to the left. How do we get out of full screen? Oh, that's a good point because you're in full screen. You've got to click on the green arrow. Yeah, yeah. But I can't see. Oh, there we go. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yeah, so everything was built mobile ready from the ground up. If any of you want to go hit this from your cell phone, you can. You can see, as Christie makes the screen small, how everything adapts. Certain information is elided. Things are displayed in a format that's really great for a cell phone. So from the ground up, mobile ready, not a separate URL, not a separate catalog. And as I said, everything is automatically on the web. All the pages could be indexed by Google. We did everything right. OK, enough cheating on my own horn. Let's move on to looking at a book. Let's look at a book, not a movie. See that here. Yeah, that's a good one there. So here's a detail page within your catalog. And you can see it's got all the information that you'd want to have and, in fact, more. So you've got the standard stuff, like tags, like subjects, and so forth. But you've also got tags, drawing from 130 million tags on library thing. You've got rating, which is drawing from 18 million, I think, ratings on library thing. You've got awards coverage. You've got media reviews. You've got one book and so forth. You've got user reviews coming in from library thing. I'll let Christy go into this a little bit more detail, but even similar books. If you like this book, you're going to like that book. The sorts of features that most library catalogs don't have, you're getting within TinyCat. That's it for me. I want to turn this over to Christy, who, although I programmed this, Christy, demos this a lot more. So let me have you do the, I've shown the trees. Let me have you show the bark. OK, great. That sounds great. Thanks, Tim. Well, I'm going to go actually jump back to the search page, because there is a few things that I wanted to show you that the home page was reviewed fairly well. Why don't I go back and actually jump to the home page? We'll go from the front all the way into a detail page. So just on top of the other things that you can add to your home page, you can include links or content above and below your animated cover display. And you can actually include them as a simple list of links, or you can include formatted HTML. It just gives you a little bit more formatting to your text. And there's many ways that you can do this. As you can see from Folio's home page, they've got links to specific collections or genres or tags or whatever. You can include library hours. Whatever you need, it's all customizable. I've even embedded my little Twitter feed down here. Let's go back into search page. And I'll show you a few other highlights, aside from search facets. Looking at to the right here, you can actually sort your searches as well. So searches are default sorted by relevancy on TinyCap. But you can also sort your searches by acquisition, by title, publication date, author, and popularity, which is calculated by library thing. And just to jump in here, so many library catalogs are still only sorting by acquisition, by the entry date. So if you want to, proof is in the pudding here, go to one of these catalogs and do some searches. And I think you'll find the relevancy very good. Yeah, and so you can see as I sort it by popularity, Harry Potter is right at the top. That makes sense. That's a pretty popular book. Beneath the book covers, you'll see that I've got these little email icons, meaning I can actually email this item directly to myself or somebody else. If I want to start building a starred list, I would click this little star icon beneath my book covers. And starred lists are great for things like research projects or reading lists, anything that you sort of need to get a list of. And you'll see that as I'm adding books to my starred list, it's tallying up in the top right here. Once I've got my starred list ready, I can actually click straight through at the top right. And I've got all of my starred items here. And I can actually go ahead and email the list to myself, to my research partner again, whoever I need. And it's shared right there. Stard list on Tinycat are all session based. So with each new browser session, this list will clear for you. Let's go back to our search. We'll try, actually, let's go to a detail page. And a few other things I wanted to look over on the detail page. You'll see that, again, under the book covers, I've now got social media sharing buttons as well. So your visitors and patrons can share specific items on their Facebook or Twitter or wherever they want. I also want to go over the self-checkout feature. You can actually enable self-checkout for patrons. Tinycat has three circulation modes available. One, you can actually disable certain patron accounts altogether. Two is simple circulation mode, which I am currently in. You'll see if I click the checkout button here. The hey, what's the password? This means I am in simple circ mode. Simple circulation is really great for high trust environments. So classroom libraries, small community groups, other libraries where you feel comfortable sharing one password with all of your patrons. And then full circulation mode is where each patron will get their own login. So let's go ahead and enter my password. Once I've entered that, I've got access to all of the patrons in the system. So I can go ahead and check this item out to whoever I need. As you'll see, I've got mostly Harry Potter characters. Let's check this out to Bill Weasley. All right, I've clicked checkout. And now that item status is automatically refreshed to check it out. It cannot be checked out by anybody else. And I've even customized it so it's showing the due date. Another feature that we've got, we have this wonderful little ask about this feature. This is particularly useful, especially if you're not allowing self-checkouts for patrons. You can show this without your checkout or place hold buttons. If a visitor can just easily click that and fill out the information that they need. You can customize the little pop-up message here. All they have to do is enter their name, email, and a comment. Maybe I want to check this out. I click submit. And now my request has been sent to the library admin and they can reach back out to me with my request. Now you have the option of choosing what type of circulation you want and you can also have or not have the ask about this button as you like. Yeah, all customizable. What else did I want to go over? Let me show you, series is a good one because series coverage in many library catalogs is not really good. So actually, I think you only have two Harry Potter books but by clicking on it. I know, I'm working on it, I'm working on it. The series coverage is exceptionally good and is easily available here and all this stuff comes free, right? If you, many of these things, if you wanted to put them in your library catalog, you'd have to get syndetics on down that would cost you many thousands of dollars but it's all available here for free if you're a small library. Perfect. I'm gonna jump out of my full screen mode here just so I can see my link to log into the admin portal. So that's pretty much the front end of TinyCat. Oh, also, let me see, actually, let me touch upon your advanced search. So on top of the regular search that you have here, if you just click this little carrot icon, the button right to the right of your search bar, you can actually reach your advanced search page which uses Boolean search logic and or search syntax and you can pretty much run any search that you need. You can even limit your search by collection, by language, or by media type. No patron will ever do this but I think some people want it so we have it. Yeah, yeah, okay. I think we can go ahead and dive into the back end of TinyCat, what I like to call the admin portal. So you see in the bottom right hand corner, we've got this little log icon. If I'm already logged in, it'll show up as a little house and I can just click that to log into my account and it's the same username and password as your library thing account. All right, go back to full screen mode. All right, so this is your admin portal. This gives you everything that you need as an admin to manage your TinyCat. You've got a link back to your catalog homepage, all of your settings pages where you're customizing the look and function of your catalog, your check in and out page where you can check in and out multiple items, history of transactions, your patrons page where you can add and import, edit, delete your patrons. You can manage your TinyCat subscriptions through your billing page. We've got this wonderful library thing links page which I'm gonna actually open up into another tab. This page is particularly useful if you are not comfortable using library thing, if you didn't start out on library thing and you don't really wanna get lost, this will give you everything that you need from your ad books page where you're actually cataloging your books, all of your import options, a link to our app and we should actually get our Android app there now since that just was released. She had my issue there. Yeah, yeah. Wait, you have a library, you have an Android app now? Oh, for library thing? I've been waiting for that so long, thank you. It is here. It's here. Yes, so everything. Yeah, well we just released it yesterday. Yeah. Yeah, so. There's a fun video being posted now or just posted where one of our employees with her boyfriend cataloged 200 something books and did it with a rapid motion camera or a slow motion camera so you could see them running around scanning everything in a small period of time. It's fun. One thing I wanna drop here is that all of this administrative stuff is also mobile ready, okay? So that you could be changing all of this on the bus or on your iPad or wherever. We assume mobile from the very start everything is built for mobile. Mm-hmm, yep. Okay. Another useful link is your help page here. This will direct you to your TinyCat help wiki and I'm not sure if I'm able to add this into the chat. But this we've written help pages pretty much on anything that you'll need. I will be very briefly going over the settings pages but this TinyCat help wiki has much more detail. So anything you might need, you know, you can always check here first. We've even written help pages for your patrons in case they need to know how to self-check out, things like that. But, you know, of course, if you can't find what you're looking for, you can always email us. We also have a discussion group on library thing where people talk about it and... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that that group is also right under your library thing page here. Let's go ahead and dive into our settings pages. So as you'll see on the left, you've obviously got a lot of different settings. So I won't be going into great detail but I'll sort of just give a one-sentence summary of what each settings page does. And if any of you have any questions, feel free to go ahead and post in the questions chat or raise your hand as Krista explained earlier. So our basic settings page is where you can view your account type. You can see if you're an all volunteer or a paid staff library. To explain the difference between the two, TinyCat is sort of a scaled, a pay scale for how you pay for your subscription. So it's based on what your library type is if you are... We can throw that at the end. Yeah, we can do that. But anyway, yeah. So you can also change your library name and decide which collections you want to include from library thing here. Your content settings is where you're going to decide what type of book covers you want displayed, which genres and collection labels to show, and you can even allow custom JavaScript. If you have a team member that knows JavaScript, that is great. Actually, one useful library that I've got a good example of that is our Center for Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies Library. What they have done is they have created, actually got to pop right back out of full screen mode. They've made this reservation and appointment form using the custom JavaScript feature. And this just helps add a little bit more flavor to your catalog if you're looking for that. All right. Your homepage settings, pretty self-explanatory where you can completely customize your homepage. You can upload your company's logo, include those links above and below your animated cover display, whatever you need. We've got the simple list of links or the free HTML if you know how to add a little bit more formatting to your text. Your search page settings is where you're going to decide which fields you want to allow to be searched and what patrons are able to see for content and search facets. Your detail page settings is where you can customize that ask about this feature that we went over. You can actually change the name of the button if you want. You can include links to library thing or Amazon, and you can customize this wonderful little mark view feature that you can include on the bottom of your detail pages, kind of a fun feature for librarians. Notice the sharing though. I mean, there's automatic sharing to all of the major services. Yeah, so if a visitor or a patron can click on the logo, you can decide which links you want to include under your book covers. So I can have all of these disabled and it will show nothing under my book covers or if I just deselect that, it'll just show the icons to Tumblr and the starred list and they can either build a starred list, email items or share a specific item on their social media accounts. I like how you have under the mark view on, in parentheses, the four librarians. Indicating that for the common non-librarian person, don't worry if you don't understand what the heck this means. Yeah. Yeah, I don't really think mark views are great, but people want them, so they're there. They are what they are and they're still used in behind the scenes of things, so it still needs to exist for the moment. So there it is. Wonderful. All right, so the detail page sections, again, pretty self-explanatory. It's very simple to add or remove fields to and from your detail pages here. We've got a lovely little drag and drop feature so you can reorganize your fields. We have two visual spacers, so you can have up to three different sections on your detail pages. To remove a field from your detail page, just click the little X at the right and it'll drop it down into your inactive fields area. If you want to add a field, just click the up arrow. It'll add the field to the bottom of your detail page and then you can drag and drop where you want that field to live. Very simple. We set up all the defaults well. We didn't include everything. I'm a firm believer that including everything is including less. So we have good defaults, but then you can make up your mind in what ways we're wrong. Yeah, and you can even restore two defaults if you just want to go back to basics. All right, your patron settings, this is where you're deciding how you want your patron names to be entered and displayed. It's also where you can decide which patron fields to use and where you're going to generate your barcodes. Your patron account settings. This is where you're going to decide if you want to enable self-checkout. Again, you can disable it. SimpleCirc, we reviewed. And then full circulation mode, if I actually click save and go to my home page, just to give you a hint, you'll be able to tell you're in full-circ mode because you've got this little person icon in the top right. So if I'm a patron, I can actually log into my account here and then I've got access to all of my current and historical barring. I can view or edit whatever information that the admin has allowed me to view and or edit all right there. And you can actually decide if you want your full circulation patrons to just log in with their barcode or require a password as well. And I can show you that on our patrons page. Your circulation settings is where you can actually customize all of the patron actions that we went over. You've got admin actions, setting your call number system, everything that you need for circulation is right here. And then finally contact info settings. This is mainly for library things, library things use. We do require at least a name and an email in case your account gets disabled and we want to make sure that it wasn't, if there was an issue or something with your account. We just want to make sure that you've got the support that you need. All right, and that's basically the settings that any questions that anyone had. Krista, are we all set to go? I'll dive into the check in and out page, I think. Check it out, yeah. Yeah. No, nobody has any questions yet. If you guys do have any questions about the presentation or what Christy and Tim are showing here, let me know. I did have one question when you were looking at the details, the different parts that could be in the record that displays. Mm-hmm. Yeah. This is all very customizable, like you said. If there's anything, is this similar to open source? Is this still a work in progress with some librarians as, hey, there's something I'd like to have in here that's not here? I can't imagine looking at this what that might be, but you never know. Is there still, could they contact you guys about, well, what about this field or that information? Well, as I mentioned before, there's a discussion group on library things. Oh, okay, that'd be a place to bring up that kind of thing. Yeah, and people say, oh, I want this, and then other people will say, well, actually, you can do it this way. You know, we have a short list of the next things we're working on, but yeah, I know it's a work in progress, and we're a small nimble company that can do stuff. I have to say that I have often seen ILS, SOPAC companies get hung up on implementing everything that everyone wants. Oh, yeah. Tinycat is really trying to come up with a solution that is gonna make people happy, but you're not paying us $50,000, so we're not gonna do the silly thing that we shouldn't do. Of course, yeah. Oh, I've seen it. All right, I'll go ahead and dive into the check in and out page now. So this is where the admin can actually check in and out multiple items. This is very easy to use. You can actually scan or search to build your item list. You can scan your barcodes if you have them, or your ISBNs, whatever you need. Let's go ahead and just add a couple items to our list now. We'll do barcode 37 and barcode 48. Now, this is brought back more than one search result. If that happens, I can just quickly click the title that I needed on my item list. Once I've got my... Notice that you can do it by title here. So, you know, somebody can do this who is not, who's not a librarian who doesn't understand what a barcode is, right? This is very simple. Yep, pretty easy. Once I've got my item list, I can select which item status I need. You can customize your own statuses as well. Then you can actually scan your patron's barcode to add them to the page, or you can actually search by their name. If I'm entering names and I enter up to three characters of the name, we have a patron name autocomplete feature where we will automatically find whatever patrons you've got in the system with that string. So, I'm gonna go ahead and check these items out to Neville on the bottom. The date is defaulting to today, and it's already auto-filling in my default circulation period, which is nice. I click save. It's telling me those are saved. And if I jump over, use my shortcut here to go into my transactions, those are right at the top as expected. So, wonderful. It's actually a nice transition to our transactions page. You can see I used my shortcut, but you can also just dive right from your admin portal and go right to the same place. So, you're gonna see your active transactions first. Those that are currently open. You can also click to all transactions and view items that have been returned or otherwise closed. You can view your transactions by title. So, if you've got multiple lending statuses for one item, they will cluster up here. This is not alphabetizing by title, but just clustering them up by item. And they're always sorted by the most recent date first. And then I can also use my statuses page here to look at specific lending statuses. I can look at just my checked out items, just my overdue items, whatever I need, all right there. Let's go ahead and dive into our patrons page. So, again, this is where you're adding or importing your patrons. I've got my wonderful list of Harry Potter patrons here. If I need to edit a patron, I can just click the pencil icon to the right, edit whatever information I need. You've also got the option to delete your patrons here. You can merge patrons. So, if you've got a volunteer that accidentally created a duplicate patron, you can actually merge patrons. So, you can clean up your patrons that way if you need. And that was a request. Someone said, you know, help library thing. We made all these extra ones. Can we figure out how to merge them? And so, we made that for them. Yeah, you can import your patrons instead of adding them one by one. You can have this very easy import option. I'll actually demo this for you right now. It's a quick three-step process. Bear with me here is my, the last couple of webinars that I've done for TinyCat, the, my computer has wanted to be very slow. So, it's not TinyCat, it's just my computer. Did you click Bros? No problem. We understand. Yeah, I don't know. I've had some speedages with my computer. I think my hard drive is just getting a little tired. That's not good. Yeah. So, I've got my patron import sample file here. So, it's just CSV format that we accept for now. So, I'm going to upload my selected file. It's gonna bring me to my patron mapping page. So, I'm just matching up the fields that I've got in the system for my patron fields with those that are in my import file. And again, it's the drag and drop feature. So, I know I don't have country. Gonna remove that. Just drag this down. Swap these two. Once those are all matched up and looking good, click submit. And now all of those patrons have just been imported into the system very quick. And also you've got, if you are running through your free trial and you've made a bunch of Harry Potter characters, you can actually go ahead and delete all of your patrons before you go live. And do not worry, if you accidentally click that button, you actually have to confirm twice before we will do that. Same thing with your transactions. All right, and then if folks have noticed this little hashtag or pound icon here, this is if you're in full circulation mode and you have required patrons to have a password with their barcode for logging in. You can generate a new password here. And at this point, you just wanna read or have them write it down on a slip of paper, some secure way of passing over the password to that patron because once you click okay, you will not see that password again. And you can do the same thing if you need to reset the password. So, no big deal. By the way, all of this is happening over SSL. That's HTTPS. So, it is by default secure, which is rare for systems. Yeah, that's pretty much it. That's usually what I go over on the back end for admin portal. Let's show the library cat page so we can show some pricing. And then while you're looking at that, you can think up questions, yeah. That is a question that someone did type in. I was waiting for you to get the demo. Somebody did say how is the cost determined for this? Yeah, so the basic idea is personal is free, okay? So you put your own books in, that's free. Lots of library thing members have used it. And in fact, lots of the suggestions we've made for making it better have just come from regular people who wanted a know pack, which is a crazy desire, but nevertheless, it exists. People with huge collections, you loan out books to people you know, your friends and family. You want to figure out and remember who the heck took this one, yeah. Exactly. So the basic distinction we make is between volunteer and paid staff. So what's the definition where we currently are saying? Volunteer is basically where you know, basically nonprofit organizations are usually nonprofit. If you've got a budget of less than $500 a year and that's not included donation. If you just get donations, then you're considered a volunteer library. Or if there's no one that is paid to actually manage the library, you're volunteer. And then the other one is paid staff and that's everyone else. And as you can see, it then happens, it then works upon a number of items, number of records that you have. So the most you can pay is $35 a month, which is pretty cheap. But you, yeah, go ahead. And 20,000 is your limit of items. That's the max that it can hold. We can push that. If you're coming in with more than 20,000, then you're gonna have difficulty growing much past that. We can easily push it to 25, but I think we're staying in that sort of area. Frankly, one way that people often use library thing is you can catalog your books on library thing. You can use TinyCat. You can then, when you get that giant grant, when your library gets larger, you can export all of your records as Mark and use some system that costs you $10,000 a year. By putting your stuff into library thing, like by using TinyCat, you're using a true cataloging utility that imports and exports Mark unlike Goodreads or something like that. That's a good way to get started, yeah. I've heard of a lot of other people saying that they need to pay to actually have the records exported. Or from other services, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we'll even make Mark records for your Amazon things, which is strange. Well, like you mentioned, if you get that grant, which we do give out here at the commission for things like this, just as a plug for us. Yeah, that's the way to get that done if you do have a previous place where all the records are and you wanna get them into this or whatever. You get a large grant, you can also just pay us more. It's possible. Out of the kindness of your heart. I know for library thing, there is the, I remember back when I first signed up, there was the options of choosing how much you wanted to pay for having your basic library thing account. I did a lifetime one. Well, in fact, if you use TinyCat at all, your library thing account is free. If you're only using library thing, there is a fee still associated with it, but there are so many holes in it. One of the holes is if you use TinyCat, it's free. If you use the Android or iOS app, it's free, so it's basically free. Yeah. So what questions have you got? Yeah, well, the cost was, is anybody, yeah, anybody have any questions about TinyCat and how to use it, anything you wanna know more about it? Type into the questions section. Let us know if there's anything, some of you who might have catalogs and you're thinking about switching to this or using this for something. And of course, we do have on the line actual, we're talking librarians here. So you may get those kind of questions. Yeah, please. Everybody looks at the, who looks at the, who looks at the mark display, but I'm weird, so. Ah, well. Yeah. So actually, one question just came in, does TinyCat support Z39.50 searches? So the cataloging on TinyCat, which is done on library thing, we connect to more than a thousand, I think we're way over a thousand now. I wanna say over 2,000, right? Yeah, because we had this massive new effort. Yeah, let's look at 2,300 something sources from all around the world. And so you can catalog, copy catalog, from thousands of sources all around the world, more than half of those sources are actually from the United States. Can you do a find for Nebraska, see if there's anything in Nebraska? Let me see, U.S., so. There's a lot there, anyway. There we go. Nebraska, there we go, Omaha Public Library, so you can catalog. Oh, yep, Metro Community College, Omaha Public. You can catalog for me, oh, Pioneer, that's one of our consortiums, we've got one here, yeah. And of course, UNL, yep, that makes sense. So copy cataloging, yes. TinyCat does not present a Z39.50 interface for other people to catalog from, although library thing has lots of data that's available for free, there's no Z39.50 for your catalog. To bring things in, yeah. We're putting stuff out, I mean. Oh, right, right. Yeah, yeah, but you probably don't wanna do that, so. How do, and you said about the importing all the records into TinyCat, how if a library's just getting started for the very first time doing anything electronic, what's the best way for them to try and get something ready to be able to use this? Is it, I mean. Yeah, so. You know, they've been doing things in paper still, they are like the small church library, the small school, whatever. So you can catalog on library thing on this page here. You can use a barcode scanner if you have one, or you can buy one from us. We have. The app is really quick too. Yeah, and then the other option is get the app. There's an iOS app, there's an Android app, the Android app, both of them actually scan barcodes, so you can type in the ISBN if you want, or you can just pass your phone over a book and it magically scans it. When you do that, you can, by default, it will take the records from Amazon, but you have a simple setting where you can change so that it takes the records from library sources instead. Either way, as I've said before, you'll get a mark record, but the Amazon mark records are not as detailed. Right, and depending on what you're doing that may be all that you need, you don't need like full on like Library of Congress mark records. What's that one under search there? Overcat underneath Library of Congress? Oh yeah, so Overcat is, it's the largest pile of library records besides OCLC. It's every free library records that are pieces of library records that are out there. It's Library of Congress, a huge piece of the British library, the whole German library, a whole bunch of other libraries around the world that have made their records public, and they're all gathered into Overcat, and so it's actually larger than any individual source, but you may want to cut off University of Nebraska if that's what you had. Yeah, nice, I've been, since I'm not dealing directly with OCLC related things anymore, I'm kind of out of touch with some of these cool ways to get mark records. One thing we don't connect to is OCLC because that would be money and rights. You don't want to get connected to that kind of issue, no. Also because they hate us because we fought them, so, yeah. We're recording. So when the, for the patron records, is there, you put all the patron info in there, is there any way for a patron to update their own info in their account? Yeah, I think she showed that you can, yeah, log into there, okay. And you can, as an admin, you can also decide which patron fields in your system they can actually view or edit. So obviously I can't edit my name or my barcode because that would be. You don't want your fifth graders changing everything but there might be something that you want them to do. That's some basic info, right? Okay, it's one things you'd be updated or whatnot, yeah. Okay, so they do have that kind of ability. And they don't have to, patrons don't have a library thing account themselves, it's just they have an account, and they could if they wanted to. Patrons should not, you can have a link to library thing in your TinyCat library but by default there is no link to library thing, the patron would have no idea library thing was involved in it. And it's your little world, not ours. Yeah, and I should clarify to actually edit your information, you need full circulation mode. Right. Okay, great. But yeah. Does it, whoa, my questions are scrolling here, hang on a sec guys. What about interlibrary loan? Does it support that? There's no specific feature built for that. Yeah, there's no specific feature built for that. That's the end of my comment. There's no feature built for it. If you have an idea of what we should do there, let us know. Go to that library, the discussion group and see if there's somebody talking about it there, yeah. I can imagine that would be something, yeah, it's a whole nother level of stuff that I don't know. There's a lot of things that we could add to this. I think we're trying to, I would rather make it easier than I would make it larger. So, but both are obviously on the table. Oh, one thing you'll notice there is if you don't have a cover, you'll notice that book scrolling by, that one there, we generate fake covers for anything that doesn't have a cover, title author and hard cover. And another thing you just, you get covers, you can, you get covers automatically from Amazon. You can turn those off and only get covers from library thing, which we have some formerly in covers if you like. So yeah. Yeah, with library thing, I've done that myself before when I had a particular edition of a book scanned in my own book cover and uploaded it to my library thing, records that I was using, yeah. The app also has a really nice cover uploader editor. Oh, cool. I did already find it in the app store, by the way, for in the Google Play Store. So, there's my big L on my phone screen already. All right, we do have questions. Okay, here is a question from Emily here. She's actually from UNL Wall Library here. She teaches cataloging classes. She says, I teach cataloging classes and this looks like it would be a good way to give students hands-on experience with an integrated library system. Do you offer trial accounts for educators or is this something you might consider in the future? Or how would that be? Actually, tell me if I'm wrong. I think that's entirely falling under the free go-ahead-and-do-it category. Since you're not a paid, a library paid, yeah, you could totally, yeah. Yeah, if you're signing up as a personal library and you're not actually lending yet, otherwise you would be an all-volunteer like as a classroom teacher. But yeah, go ahead and sign up for TinyCat. If you go here, there's this little sign-up button and you will automatically get a free library thing account and you can use TinyCat for free. So I don't think we ever made a thing that I'm gonna make a policy right now being the founder of everything. That is completely free, go ahead and do it. Everything has for a long time been on those 22 things. There are 20 things, whatever the things is. Oh yeah, the 20 things, yeah, we did that. And so it's a good way to learn something about cataloging and integrated library systems and yeah, go to town. I think it's, we love to see more of that. The more people that know about us the better and show up on library things talk and talk about it. We love to hear what people think. Emily says, cool, thanks. I'm gonna recommend that to our cataloger here too. She also does some teaching to see if that's something she would have use of or not. Yeah, every year we see a whole raft of people signing up for exactly this thing. I know Simmons used to have all their people make a library thing account before they, before they got into the nitty gritty of mark records they would start with library. Oh cool, yeah, awesome, yeah. It is, like she says, a nice hands-on, free, easy way to just show here's the basics of what a catalog looks like behind the scenes is that having to throw them into the deep end. The problem is you're gonna start with this and then you're gonna be thrown into one of the major ILS systems out there and you're gonna go, oh my God. What did I get myself into? Let's see, I got another question here. It's a long one, so I'm reading through it. I'll just read it here, okay. Is there a way to duplicate the use of a field in the catalog display? I'm thinking of special collection items where it might be useful to put a local note in more than one place in an entry of patron seats. For example, notes about the collection it is in and the location of the special collection and another note that says who donated it or some other detail, for example. So you have more than one type of thing you wanna give information, because there is a local note. Simple answer is no. Well, yeah, there is a local note area. You can obviously set up collections. So what you're thinking about is something where everything that belonged to a certain collection would have an identical local note of some sort. I think, is that what we're talking about? Probably, yeah. No, that's an interesting feature and that's not beyond possibility, but it is not a current feature. Now, are all of these fields searchable when you're looking up something in a catalog? Any ones that you wanna designate as searchable are searchable, yes. Okay. So you may have to play around that local notes field to get all that info in in the one location. Is there a limit to how long that, how much information can be in the local notes? No, I don't think so. Not that I know of, yeah. Might be 64, but if you're putting 64K in that, you're gonna have to do it with your life, yeah. Yeah. So it'd just be a single note for now, yeah. Okay. All right, did I have anything else here? Anybody else have any other extra, any questions? We've got about five minutes left of our hour here. If anyone does want to throw any more questions out to Tim or Christy about this or if you wanna see anything else on here. I say this is, I have to say, this is very cool. I'm glad I finally got you guys on the show. Now, how long ago, I know Taniq had spent out for a couple of years. When did it first debut? Just over a year ago, actually, last April. Just had our sort of party for our first year, yeah. April 2016? Yes. Yeah, okay. Okay, I wasn't sure, because I know I've been hearing about it before then and I've been trying to connect to you guys to have something on about it. I'm glad we finally did. And actually, Folio from Seattle, that was, we're hoping to have someone on from them as well, because Folio itself just seems like a really cool place. I'll have to do a whole separate show on just that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They, by the way, are the only library that is allowed to have, I think they've got like 50,000 volumes that are allowed to, and you can see that even with that, it's quite fast, so. Oh yeah, it looked pretty good to me, even coming through the screen sharing here, absolutely. I've been using everything that I said for a lot. Gosh, I couldn't even remember how long. Does it tell me when I first started using it on there? In fact, you'll get various awards at five and 10 years if you... Ah, I'll have to see. I'll have to check that out. It'll show on your profile page when you've been a member since. Yeah. And I have been very lax in getting any of my current books in there, but I did have, I do have somewhere in a box, one of the old QCAT barcode scanners. Yeah, we still sell those. You still have those? Yes. Okay, if anyone's interested in those. I have so many of those in my attic, please buy some. There are very cool boxes. If you're looking for a barcode scanner, and it's very simple, and you don't want to go to see the box, and it looks like a cat. It's shaped like a little crouching kitty cat. It is perfect for libraries. I used it to scan my books, but now that I have the phone up too, I may have to check out that and see how that works. Actually, I find the QCAT faster. Is it? Okay. Well, it's partially simply because holding your phone and wiggling it around gets tiresome. It's really cool for the first hundred books, and then your on-falls off, so. Yeah, QCAT works pretty much just like a regular scanner, and it's good price, and mine still works, and yeah. You can get to the traditional library once now for under $100, go into eBay or something, so. Sure, yeah, the gun-type style. Yeah, gun-type, yeah. All right, so it doesn't look like anybody typed in any other questions while we were chatting. Well, thank you so much for inviting us on. Yeah. If anyone has any questions, we're easy to reach. Tim at librarything.com. You can find us in a number of other ways. Are you at Christie at librarything.com, right? Yeah, and I'm gonna try to enter it into the chat now. It's Christie, K-R-I-S-T-I. You know, there's a million. Yeah, the library thing also works too, yeah. Yeah. Okay, let's see here. All right. Oh, okay, so how do you spell the name of that scanner? It's, oh, it's with a Q-cat, and I'll actually, I can show you. Oh, we do, right. If you go under the More tab, once you're in librarything, there's a little store link here. So we've got this adorable little Q-cat, it's C-B-C-A-T. Yes, yep. And we also sell printed barcodes, if you need, as well. It's, yeah, then you can get them personalized and stuff like that. Oh, I need to get a 10-10. Those are pictures of my child and other children, yes. I have one of the older, I think the red T-shirt there, the kids' classic, I think I have that style. Oh, there's the adult one, yeah. It was from a long time ago. I mean, I get it. Definitely, are you going to ALA? Me, no, I am not. No, last week, well, anyone's going to ALA. Come by the ProQuest booth, send me a tweet. So you're just gonna have the ProQuest when you're not gonna have a separate library thing. Booth, you're just doing the- Not this time, no, because we're doing a lot of stuff with ProQuest now, but we'll definitely be there going to all the events and stuff. And actually, yeah, can you just, we still have a minute or two here, and actually if we go along, that's fine. Can you briefly explain the difference of what's going on with the library thing for libraries to the new? Yeah, sure. Christie, can you quickly find Synthetics Unbound? Yeah, so library thing for libraries is this product that makes your library catalog better. So if you've got CerseiDynex or TripleI, or whoever TLC, library thing for libraries makes it better by adding things like reviews and tags and recommendations. It's like an add-on to your current regular system. That's right, an add-on to your current system, and it kind of makes it better, more social. Yeah, and so if you go to, that's the library thing for libraries. Synthetics Unbound is the next step. We got together with the people at ProQuest, and Synthetics Unbound combines everything that they have traditionally done with everything that we've traditionally done. So you get covers, professional reviews. From them, you get reviews, user reviews, and recommendations from us, and it all comes wrapped up in a beautiful package. Click on the Raven Boys, if you will, there at Hartford Public Library. So this is in a catalog that costs many thousands of dollars, but then library thing and ProQuest have added in all this great detail, like you may also like these books. You'll look inside, reader reviews, shelves, series, and so forth, all wrapped up in a way that integrates with your library catalog and makes it look great. And yeah, if you're interested in that, check out the cute, slightly corny video that's on Synthetics Unbound. And we'd love to talk to you about that, too. Yeah, like the only reason I'm going to ALAs, because this costs real money, whereas Tiny Pat, if you're paying us $10 a month, that's not going to pay for my beer, so. No. Sure, so if you're the, more than 20,000 titles items library and those bigger ones and you're looking for something, this would be the thing for you to investigate. Thank you so much for inviting me. Awesome, all right, yeah. I'm so glad to have you guys on now. Now, I'm re-invited, big rated about using my library thing. I need to take the afternoon and go home and go home and start scanning more of my books. Wonderful. And with the new Android app, you can do it very quickly. Yeah. Thanks a lot, take care. All right, thank you. All right, I'm going to pull back, present your control to my screen now here. Great, so that I can wrap things up, all right. And you should be seeing, there we go, yes. All right, so we have been recording, as I just did say earlier today's show, and this is our Encompass Live website. If you just Google Encompass Live, luckily so far we are the only thing called that in the world yet, so our Encompass Live links will come up first in your search results. And these are upcoming shows, but right underneath them I have a link to the archives, and this is where today's recording will be here. This is from last week's, we had a representation last week of slides, we won't have that today, recording and a collection of links. I will mention anyone who does this kind of thing. We have been using Delicious for years to collect all of our links to websites that have been mentioned in the show, and just recently it has been bought, and will be what they call, they're freezing it, we won't be able to add any more links to it, so this will be changing to something else that we're trying to investigate what to do with our links. But we still have them out there for you guys somehow, we'll see what that ends up looking like. Trying to get all the information about a presentation to you when you go to look at the archives, so you don't have to search it all out for yourself. So that'll be there. Probably later today, maybe tomorrow, you'll all get emails from me, let me know, let you know when it's out there. Tim and Christy, when I have the recording up, I'll let you know too, you can feel free to use it for any of your promotion if you feel, you did a good job today. Thanks so much. You're welcome to do that. So that will be that, and then I hope you join us next week when our topic is feelings are messy, building emotional intelligence in library land. Annika Ramirez is director of our Three Rivers Library System here up in Northeast Nebraska, and she'll do a presentation about how to deal with other people in your related relationships with other people that you work with, specifically in the library world. So definitely sign up for that session and any of our other ones that we have coming up here in the schedule. Also, Encompass Live is on Facebook. We have a link here to our Facebook page, which I've got open over here. So if you are a big user of Facebook, like us and you'll get notifications of like here when I remind everyone to log in today for today's show, when recordings are available, when other episodes are coming up, we'll promote them here on our Facebook page. So if you are a big Facebook user, give us a like over there. Other than that, that wraps it up for this morning show. Thank you very much for attending and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye.