 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Krista Burns, your host here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is Library Commission's week-on-line event, where we cover any of the interest in Nebraska librarians. We do these sessions every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. And we do a mixture of presentations, interviews, interviews, anything we get published. And today we have our, today's session is our tech talk with Michael Sowers, the Library Commission's technology innovation librarian sitting next to me here. He does him about monthly updates on any new interesting techy things that are out there, and he can answer your questions about any tech-related things. And this morning we have an interview that he's going to be doing for us, so he's the last minute thing, but we're glad, happy to have it. And so I'm going to now turn it over to Michael to do his thing. Great, thanks Krista. As Krista said, I'm Michael Sowers, I'm the technology innovation librarian here at the commission. And as part of these tech talks, what I've been so far successful in doing, although I was almost unsuccessful this month, is finding someone I think is interesting to interview about technology related to libraries. And this month we have Tim Spalding, who is the founder and person in charge of LibraryThing.com. And let me, oh, Tim, where'd he go? Krista, can you unmute him? Tim, are you there? Yes, I am. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thanks for joining us. I know you're really busy. I'm going to let Tim kind of take control and give you a tour of LibraryThing in just a minute here. But I was wondering, Tim, if you could just maybe introduce yourself and give us a little bit of your background for the audience. Yeah, so, I mean, I'm not a librarian. I was a scholar, ultimately I'm a failed scholar. I dropped out of graduate school for Greek and Latin. And, you know, I was a very bookish youth and a bookish adult as well. And I started LibraryThing really as a way to catalog my own personal library. And it became something more than that, something like a career. So LibraryThing is now a company. We've got some 10 people, three of them librarians. But as I said, I am not one. OK, well, I promise not to hold that against you. I've met Tim just full disclosure. I met him several times. He's a really wonderful guy. Got no, yeah, Krista's gotten a note of two. So, Tim, I'm going to go ahead and give you presentation control there. Great. Oh, sorry, hold on. Oh, I'm sorry, I just clicked the button marks not yet. Can you do it again? Oh, OK, let's let's it was the blue one. OK, give me a sec here. We see I've seen you have lost something on my screen. This is this is the technology show here, everyone. So, oh, he's on your staff. Yes, there we go. Change presenter. Why is he not listed in my presenter list? Because he is the presenter right now. Oh, OK, I think you are the presenter. Oh, OK, can people see my screen now? No. OK, give me a sec here. Let me. I'm going to. Hang on. Back to you. Yeah, it's back to us. I gave it back to you. OK, now let's. Oh, I see on the screen. There we go. OK, hold on. Try now. There. OK. I work with computers. Don't we all? Expert in this stuff, yeah. So Tim, why don't you take a little bit and give us a tour of library thing for us? Sure thing. So library thing, as I said, grew out of my desire to catalog my own books, something that I had been doing much of my life. And it really grew from there. And the basic idea is that if many people catalog their books in one place, in some sense they catalog together. So I've come up with a concept called social cataloging. And it really drives everything that library thing does. I talk about a ladder of social cataloging. And this is a ladder that you ascend as you use the site. It's a ladder that the site itself has ascended. And it starts at the bottom with personal cataloging and ends with a much more complicated thing like true collaboration. So I'm just going to put that up briefly. And I've probably mentioned some rungs along this ladder. But just to get the sense that there are people who only use the site to list the books that they're reading or the books that are in their personal library. And there are people who do true collaboration with other people around bookish topics. So just to start off, anyone can go to library thing. Until you've got a lot of books, it's completely free. After that, it's pretty cheap. You just go. You create a membership. I'm already a member, so I'll just type in my name here. And it brings me to this screen that's got a million things going on on it. But when you really come down to it, the core of library thing is probably this screen, adding books to your library. People tend to spend, I don't know, maybe a third of their time on library thing just on here. So I take it in a book. It's all right? That would be us. Yeah. So you type in a book, like I just typed in Huckleberry Finn. And lots of different editions appear on the right. If I were to specify an author or a publisher or an ISBN, I could narrow it down more. Library thing is unique among the sites that do this because we search library sources as well as Amazon, which is the current source. So we start 690 libraries around the world. And probably a majority are in the United States, but lots and lots of libraries around the world. So it's really good for everything. Now, let me see if there's anything in Nebraska. I don't even know. There we go. University of Nebraska. I can add that to my list of libraries. And when I search for Huckleberry Finn, I'll search the University of Nebraska's collection. It might be slow. Anyway, you can add books from all these libraries. And library thing consumes mark records and tries to do justice by the quality of that data. So yeah, here you see items in the University of Nebraska. Once you've done that, you get something like this. So this is my library at present. And it looks kind of like Excel. You've got cover. You've got title. You've got author, date, tags, which are these free form subject kettings that I add myself. I can rate a book. This is actually a very good book. So I'll give it a five stars publication. As I mentioned, library thing gets into the library data quite deeply. So we have LC classification, DUI, LCSH. When I switch here to style C, you can see library thing is doing some things that are a little bit more unexpected. This isn't a good example. But you can see things like series, important places, awards, and honors. Things that don't normally appear in a library catalog are somehow appearing in library thing. And I'll show you how. One of the best ways to look at the library is when you click the covers button, as I just did. And this shows your library as if it were sitting on a shelf as a set of covers. Of course, no one actually faces their books out like this. But if they're faced out like this, it's really easy to look at somebody and just get a quick sense of the kind of person that they are. Library thing is really equivalent to going to someone's house and croaking your neck to see the books that they have. Look at that all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Have you read all these books? I've read a lot of them. I have a lot of nonfiction, and one doesn't consume nonfiction in quite the same way. That would be my very true. Anyway, so here's my profile. And I think two things should strike you about this. One is that I'm better looking in this photo than I am in the photo that Michael put up. No, the thing that should strike you is this looks like a standard social networking profile. You've got pictures of me. You've got information about me, sites that I'm on, where I am. All the information is voluntary. But this resembles Facebook or whatever. What I think is equally striking here is that I'm going to blow it up here. Library thing puts a lot of emphasis on this area here, members with your books. Now, we have the familiar concept of friends, but a lot of the interaction on the library thing is going on with people who have your books. And the idea is that this person shares 53 books with me. Even if I'm not a friend of his, and in this case, we share something that's pretty cool. So a lot of these people, like this guy here, I share 59 books with, looking at his library, talking to him, seeing what sort of books he recommends. All that becomes immediately interesting to me. And library thing is always trying to do something more than near social networking. It's about your friends if you want it to be, but it's about what you love most of all. So yeah, here's a feature called Connections, where I can keep up with my friends and other people who aren't my friends, looking at what they've reviewed recently, what they've added to their wish list, and so forth. So I can keep up with it like that. Library thing has an extensive social section of the site. There's a groups section here. The largest group on library thing is librarians who library thing, which is like 6,000 people, which is still only less than a percentage of the site. But a lot of librarians on the site, we have a lot of people who like that. You can see here in the talk section, these are all messages that I've been involved in one way or another groups along to posts that I've made. But again, there's this thing here called Your Books. And when I click on Your Books, it tells me all the conversations that are going on about books in my library, because there's a way when you're having a conversation to indicate what books are mentioned. So these are conversations going on about my books, even if I don't know these people or I'm not in this group. Library thing is giving me an in based upon the shared data. So we also have an extensive local area that I invite you to explore. We've got more than 50,000 bookstores and libraries marked on a map. You can find out what's near them. You can find out events that are going on. Here is an example, one of my favorite libraries, the Boston Atheneum. Find out the other people who love this place. Find out the events that are going on there. We also have an iPhone application for this. It's really cool when you go to a new city. It's a cool way to discover it. Anyway, so here is an example of what library thing produces when everyone works together. So there's 45,000 people who have Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. And I can see over here people who've added it recently, my friends, employees, all sorts of other people. You can see a section here of tags. Library thing has over 63 million tags added by members. That's an enormous amount of tags, far more than anyone's ever assembled for books. And the result here is a tag cloud that pretty much describes this book. If you don't know what tag clouds are, the idea is that the more times a word is used or a tag is used, the larger it is. So I'll show numbers here. Young adult is used almost 1,000 times, fantasy is used 5,000 times, and so on. If I were to show all of these, it'd probably be about 100,000 tags. I won't do that. You can also see all these people together have made tags. But through the logic of algorithms, they've also made recommendations. So library thing has determined that people who like Harry Potter also like these books here. And we find these are pretty good recommendations. We also let members make their own hand recommendations, readers advisory, or hand selling. We have a cool feature called Will You Like It, which tries to determine if you'll like it. We like to do things that Amazon would never do. Amazon would never have a button that tells you you probably will not like the book. I think we try to do lots of reviews. So all these people working together have created something pretty cool. Here's a section called Common Knowledge. Members enter data about the book. So what are the characters in it? What are the important places? What's the dedication? First words? The last words? I've spoiled it for you. So all of this stuff entered by members. The Common Knowledge system is about to hit 2 million edits for members and has created one of the richest sources of book data out there, all of which was very consciously chosen to not be things that libraries know because we don't want to duplicate effort. But libraries don't keep track of characters and places. So I am very passionate about tags. I'll always speak to you about them for a few minutes. But there's a whole talk up on Vimeo and YouTube about tag that will go on for almost an hour about it. Tim, if I could interrupt you with a quick question. Do I have to create an account to get access to all this data? Well, no, certainly not. If you want to, you know, library thing is a very good tool for reader's advisory. You know, someone comes into the library and they say, you know, I just finished Harry Potter. What else should I read? And obviously that's an easy one. But you know, very obscure books will have pretty good recommendations. What are my favorite? Without an account, someone could see those recommendations. You can see everything on the site. That's right. You won't get to add them to your library. You won't get to have friends. But you can see all of the data. So here's a really obscure academic book about Alexander the Great. It's still got 114 people and very good recommendations. Yeah, you know, I recommend you join it. And there's no downside. We're sort of a pre-Facebook style site in that we don't require anything of members. You can refuse to give us your email. You can make your account entirely private. And you have very strict control over where your data goes. But so I encourage you to make an account and play with it. So briefly, can I jump on to tags? Oh, go right ahead. Thanks. So tags are just this wonderful thing that Library Thing has assembled. You've probably heard of tagging before. And I would encourage you to just throw out everything you've heard about tagging. Most of the things that are told to librarians about tagging are based upon Flickr. Delicious, a few other sites like that. Book tagging ends up looking very different. And with respect, it is more like what librarians should be interested in. Book tagging is seriously interesting in a way that I think Flickr image tagging should be necessarily needed to most librarians. Library Thing has 63 million tags. We add more tags every day than the largest library tagging project has added in five years. That's the University of Pennsylvania. So it's really a remarkable resource. In this case, cooking, it's just a popularity contest. But you will notice, of course, that the tag is not cookery, because people use the word that comes to them naturally rather than some unusual word. Cookery is the library tagging. And I can't figure out who would tag something cookery unless they're a librarian. So I think these are probably things with librarians. Librarians and catalog are probably. They're the only people that know it. Yes. So here's a good example of where tags work. This is the chiclet tag. And this is the chiclet reading list. It's got all the top stuff. It's sorted by relevance, which is something that subject headings don't do. Everything that is a man-woman relationship in library-converged subject headings is a man-woman relationship equally. Whereas with tags, you can look at statistics and decide, Bridget Jones' diary is a really, really good example of chiclet. But way, way down the list here, there are things that are much less good examples of it. If you don't like chiclet, here's cyberpunk. A classic example here would be something like Neuromancer, which has completely bizarre subject headings. I think one of them is information superhighway fiction, which is a completely dated term. Another one, my favorite, is nervous system wounds and injuries fiction. But there's no cyberpunk. There isn't even science fiction. For people who care about that, and there's people who practically only read cyberpunk, tags are just a wonderful way of getting to it. Paranormal romance is another great example. There are people out there who only read paranormal romance. I would say that being used almost 50,000 times with the top books having hundreds of examples, this is a really solid, defensible subject or genre. And it's great to have a way to capture what you have. You can see in this one here, France, World War II fiction, that when you add tags together, you can get some of the benefits of a structured subject system, right? If you look down here on the right, you'll see some of the related subjects. Library thing is always tying the library thing data to the library data. And the subject, LCSH is great because it's hierarchical. And can get into great detail. Well, you get some of that value by adding tags together in what library thing calls a tag mash. So here's a book, some random Star Wars book that you probably have not read, and I certainly have not read. Members have added the information down here. I'm probably going to quickly here. You know, members have added that this belongs in the Star Wars series, the Lando Calrissian Adventure series, and the Star Wars Rise of Empire series. That boils down to something like this, which is 610 Star Wars works, right? All of these books have been rated as part of the Star Wars series. If you look over here on the right, you can see 107 related series, Rise of the Empire, Clone Wars, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? This is more good information about how the Star Wars books fit together than any library has ever assembled, than any librarian that I know has in their head, right? And I would argue that's a good thing, right? That the guys who really know Star Wars are the guys who are editing library thing at 3 a.m. in their underwear. And that isn't necessarily something that libraries should try to be the experts in. So this might be a case where libraries can learn something from regular people, not always. By the way, all this data is completely free. It's a Creative Commons attribution license. So it's all completely free. Amazingly, nobody uses it at the moment, to be sure. So one of the cool things that library thing does is just get people involved in different projects. Library thing has harnessed the power of book love, like all get out. We attract a lot of really nerdy book people. We attract a lot of catalogers. So at some point, I proposed that we cataloged Thomas Jefferson's library. It had been cataloged before in book form, but I figured, well, why don't we try and make an online catalog of it, and then we can see the books that we share. So I share 57 books with Jefferson, because I got a lot of Greek and Latin, and so does he. And library thing members made very short work of this as a couple of days. We then proceeded to do things like John Adams, which is great because John Adams shares the most books with Jefferson, which is a great shared worldview there. We did Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Tupac Shakur, the famous rapper. We've done over 150, we call them famous dead people's libraries, and all of it's been done by members working from a variety of sources. Sometimes they're printed sources, sometimes they're archival sources. In a number of cases, they've been original works of research. A librarian in Massachusetts did the first catalog of a famous Puritan family. And just leveraging all these people who enjoy cataloging, who enjoy exposing the world of books, it's never been exposed before. And then when you get it all together, you can see, I share 57 books with Jefferson, and I share 35 books with C.S. Lewis. And I can see the books they share together. And so all this stuff that library thing people are doing, you know, it goes in ascending, in ascending stairway or ladder, where at the bottom you're doing it just for yourself. And as you ascend, the stuff that you're doing for yourself starts to become helpful to other people. And at the very top, there are, I don't want to exaggerate, but a couple hundred people who spend a lot of time on library thing, helping other people out, working on projects like this, people whose love of books previously might not have been fully expressed. So that's, I did it in 26 minutes, I'm very impressed with myself. That's libraries in a nutshell. Michael, I'll turn it back over to you. Great, thanks Tim. I've got some questions that I kind of pre-planned for Tim. We've got some questions that have already come in and I'll ask Tim of those. And so if you've got any others, feel free to either type them into the Q and A or raise your hand if you want to ask via audio and we'll do our best to try to pull that off. But to one question that came through from the audience to which I will answer because I have a feeling Tim won't know the answer to this question. When he was on the Star Wars page, somebody was noticing the BBY on something. And unfortunately, I do know the answer to that. Before the Battle of Yavin, isn't it? Yes, all right, Tim. Before the Battle of Yavin, that's the battle at the end of the first Star Wars movie to which then the timeline is established before or after. So I just think I made myself into one of those 3 a.m. and you're under our guise. But anyways. Nobody wants to know. So that's a very big Star Wars deep preference that is the library thing. Yep. Well, there are numbers of organized these things in this order which you would never know if you weren't one of those people. Right. And then the other question that has already come in, Tim, is you threw out a term called a tag mash at one point and someone was willing, if you could, maybe fill us in a little more what you meant by that. Maybe show us an example. If I might throw out a question for myself, I wanna briefly show library thing for libraries too, which I totally forgot about. Oh, sure. Yeah. Showing the child. Yeah, so the idea of a tag mash is simply to take a bunch of tags and put them together. So, how many books are there that are both zombies and romance? Well, a fair number actually. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies gets number one. But it's great for other things too. You got cooking Indian. So it's taking two tags and doing something like a Venn diagram of them. And it was one of those things that we didn't do until we had millions of tags, but with 63 million tags, the data is just so rich that you can do really quite complicated things. Chiclet, it takes place in Greece. There's actually a fair amount of it. So yeah, it's something that actually library thing invented. I haven't seen any other site do it quite the same way. I should also mention one thing here about tags. You probably saw some of this that Chiclet includes these variants. Another good example would be WWII, World War II, includes variants World War II spelled out and WWII and these vices, Elk Creek and all these other things. Library thing members performs something like authority control on tags. And they also do it on authors and works as well. The whole bibliographic system is available to people to change and although you might think they all go crazy, they don't, they produce something pretty good. So Anne Frank is a number of different names, but the diary of a young girl, all the various editions have been combined together by library thing members, there's over 244 covers. All of that was done by library thing members in part to help each other and in part because when you combine your obscure edition of the Diary of a Young Girl with the larger work, then you gain friends and connections. So anyway, can I do quickly library thing for libraries? Okay. Yeah, so I got the debug turned on here, but basically library thing for libraries takes features from library thing, features and data and it puts them inside of a library catalog. This is the High Plains Library in Colorado I think and it's got features from library thing, like a tag cloud here, it's got a tag cloud here on the left and when I click on one of these, I find all the books that are about vampires within the High Plains Library, sorry. I've got everything turned on debug mode here so it looks a little bit programmary. But anyway, the idea is that you see all the, you see all the tag stuff that you would see on library thing, you've got similar books, which is recommendations, you've got other editions, so tying together all the editions of New Moon by Stephanie Meyer, one of those things that just incredibly library catalogs stand out to do. Here's a reviews feature, so your patrons can add their own reviews and then library thing kicks in 450,000 reviews of itself. And we just added this one, which I think is just good looking, which is showing your library's books on a shelf as if they were sitting on a shelf and it brings some of the serendipity back into the computer experience. I can browse around this as if I were standing in front of the library rather than just searching, searching, searching. So anyway, it's a product that we sell, it works with basically every OPAC, we've got a list of 200 odd, some more, we have a list of 200 odd libraries that are currently using it. And so yeah, any more questions? And the library thing for libraries, is that a free service? No, it's not a free service, no, it is a pay service. I'm just gonna see here, Nebraska, okay. University of Nebraska is currently using our library thing for libraries. So they're only using tags, but if you go to their catalog, you can check it out or go to any of the others listed on our wiki. And it is not free, it costs real money. Basically every single page of your OPAC is enhanced and every single page is hitting us for information, so it's not at all cheap for us to deliver it. But compared to upgrading to a next generation catalog, it's much, much cheaper. And in case anybody in the audience couldn't tell, I need to answer that question. Another audience question, is there any staff doing anything to any of this data? I mean, I know like you massage your own data because your own collection is in here, but is it all done by the members? Is there any staff that is participating in maybe cleaning up the data or things like that? Correcting or proofing, that kind of thing, editing. Yeah, no, pretty much the members do it. I mean, there are some layers to it. I'll show you here the helper's log, which shows you the stuff that people have been doing to help us in the last hour. People have been doing, well, not much, but people have been doing stuff all day, helping us, combining works, changing stuff. In a very small number of cases, we require a certain amount of voting. When you want to combine a tag, you've got to get a majority of, a strong majority, a super majority of people to agree because it just causes havoc if tags are being combined and uncommined all the time. But we use goodwill as the first stop. The second stop is checks and balances so that people can't do things crazy without other people agreeing. Everything is reversible. So even if someone makes a mistake, it can be reversed rather quickly. And then very, very occasionally, someone will complain about something that needs to be fixed by staff, but not very frequently. I am just saying, a lot of the users are actually librarians, so. Yeah. So it really is a member-driven and created thing. I mean, the core of it is coming from libraries and from Amazon. And we should never downplay that or not speak of that. That's really where the best value comes. But members add a lot of stuff on top. That's true. So it's kind of a mash-up of the official, I think what we're asked the person was concerned about is where does this, so let's speak mark record type information. Well, it comes from places like the Library of Congress, places like other libraries, so that is the good stuff. And all the extra content added by the users is the great stuff, like who would like this book? What is it about? The things that when you have someone come in and wants a readers advisory type thing, that's the cool extra stuff that's put in there by the users. Yeah, I think it's really, it's neither OCLC nor Wikipedia. It's the marriage of the two in a certain sense. And I am not an extremist about user-contributed data and I obviously am not an extremist about authoritative data. I think there are some things that it really works for and some things that user-contributed data doesn't work for. To give you an example, we mounted a rather big effort to create a replacement for Dewey. We called it the open shelves classification. And if there is one thing that is really hard to develop in a group, it's a classification system. It was just one fight after another. And it was fun to try, but some things don't work. Some things you really need an authority for. But when it comes to the definition of thriller, I think it's a lot better to ask a thousand people than it is to have one librarian who may or may not be an expert in thrillers to decide. We have another question from the audience. We have one person who I believe from our signing sheet is currently in Massachusetts, but she says she will be heading back to Brazil. She's specifically asking about Portuguese, but is library thing currently or planning to be available, the interface itself in other languages? Yeah, no, library thing is currently available in more than a dozen languages. I can't remember whether this is Brazilian Portuguese or Portuguese Portuguese. GT2 maybe? BR, I can't remember. Anyway, so we have it in Portuguese. We've been very successful in a couple of languages. Yeah, so here's one version of Portuguese. Our most successful sites are Holland, Denmark, other Scandinavian countries. But, and then my favorite one is Catalan, the language of Catalonia in Spain. These are smaller than librarything.com, but we've got some serious uptake in a couple of countries. And again, all of the translation is done by members. And it's significant that library thing is the only service that uses a lot of different data. The sites you may have heard of besides library thing would be Goodreads and Shelfari. And they use nothing but Amazon data. And they don't let you edit your data. And if it's not available from Amazon, you got to type it all in yourself or else, or maybe it's not available at all. And so we really want to be kind of a world solution and a solution that respect the quality of that. Good, great. I had a question which I've never asked you before and you are a for-profit company. So if you don't want to tell me too many details, I understand, but to get a little geeky and technical for a moment, what's under the hood of all this? What started were in software involved? Oh, I thought you were gonna ask how we made money. Oh, no. Yeah, so I mean, library thing is, you know, it started with me personally growing pretty rapidly and organically. Library thing would never have been possible without open source software. You know, we have Apache and Linux underneath, PHP, MySQL, a lot of the Mark Parsons code is in Python, Mencached, you know, I've just listed 10 projects that are open source projects. PHP is the core programming technology. MySQL is the core database technology. And you know, we, I think we have like 10 servers now, but they're commodity servers. It really is a testimony to the power of Moore's law, the idea that every year computers get basically twice as fast. This is not actually officially released, but I'll show it to you. We have this thing here called OverCat, and this is a search. This is a search of 35 million library records, which makes it, which we have stored, which makes it the largest bibliographic data source outside of OCLC by a considerable magnitude. And it's called from public records that open library is produced in others, as well as records that library thing has gathered over the years. We have zero intention of monetizing it in any way or selling it. We never sell library data, we never will. But you know, on our 10 servers, with everything else we do, we manage to do a search that is almost as comprehensive as OCLCs and is pretty damn fast. That's pretty amazing, you know, because library thing, library thing's annual budget is a third of what the president of OCLC, no, no, half of what the president of OCLC makes every year. So, Krista, you're still employed by OCLC, aren't you? Well, I am not, actually. Well, you're not, okay, good, all right. No longer OCLC connected at all since last summer, so. Excellent, okay, well, anyways. It's amazing how much can be done now. You know, we've got 10 commodity boxes and we're not that smart programmers, and we still manage to do some stuff that's pretty impressive in terms of scale. Okay, great. Another question from the audience, and they're specifically kinda asking about DVDs, but what about cataloging other material other than books, other formats? Yeah, yeah, well, I think it really, it really spreads out from the book. Audio books are very easy to catalog, they're very similar. We certainly have people cataloging DVDs and CDs. The data model is different enough that we don't encourage it. You know, it's, this is a different data model, and this is true, this is true in the Amazon data. It's also true in Mark, you know, a Mark record for a piece of sheet music or CD. You know, it's just quite different from a book. The library thing is really set up for books, but there's certainly people who catalog that. There's people who've cataloged, someone cataloged the entire library of perfumes, I don't know why, but they did it. You can do basically whatever you want, but you know, the system is based around books, and the community is based around books. We may at some point do something, but if, you know, to extend that, but you know, if we're gonna extend it, we wanna have a community that loves music, you know, separate, probably. So yeah. And speaking of formats, and you know, I read your blog and whatnot, so maybe, you know, I can guess some of this, but what sort of impact, if any, do you see of eBooks on, say, library thing? Your service as opposed to, you know, books in general? Well, that's a very interesting question. You know, I think library thing, just to give you some context, you know, there is this universe of services out there now, and library thing was the first, you know, I invented this idea, and that and three bucks will get me a cup of coffee, but there are, you know, a lot of services now that do similar things, like Goodreads, like Shelfari, there's some Facebook ones too. Library thing is definitely the one for more, people who are more scrupulous about their data, but people tend to be older, more intellectual, more interested in interests than they necessarily are in friends. I would say because of that library thing has seen less impact from eBooks than you might think. Generally speaking, if you mention eBooks on library thing, someone will practically shout you down. So, you know, there certainly are people cataloging eBooks on library thing. We're working on a project to make it much, much easier to bring your stuff in and out from Kindles and iPads, but, you know, overall, I'm not seeing a lot of it, you know, just to give you, you know, my experience, I have both an iPad and a Kindle, and I don't use either for reading, so. Down the road, I mean, it's clearly gonna be big. The, you know, there are going to be devices now which are social eBook devices. Copia is coming out with one, I think there'll be some others. I don't know, you know, I worry, you know, the Amazon recently exposed this feature where you could see the most highlighted passages that people were doing, and all of a sudden, millions of people who bought the Kindle realized that Amazon was aggregating the passages that they were highlighting and showing them without their permission. I'm very much in favor of people sharing things, but I think there's a very strong tendency in the commercial world, be it Facebook or Amazon, to rig it so that you're always sharing in a way that I think is harmful to you and to both culture and culture. And that segues into one of my other questions. I see you're starting to add integration into Facebook in the library thing, and as probably most of our listeners know, Facebook has gotten some press lately about some privacy issues. How is this feature working? You know, what is library thing doing with Facebook? And how are you potentially addressing the privacy concerns that Facebook has raised in the last couple of weeks? We believe very deeply in integration of a certain sort. Here's a book, this is a recent book. Library thing has a page where it'll tell you all of the places you can buy it, buy ebooks. Versions, audible versions, audio books. There's a price comparison part here. We have this wonderful, wonderful thing where it shows you the local bookstores that have the book. Nobody else has done this. It involved a lot of really, really interesting scraping and data feeds. So here or down here is we integrate with 12 different swap sites. I believe passionately in integrating the web and hooking the web together, and library thing does that. I don't like ways of hooking the web together that strongly prejudice one side over another. We haven't added the like it buttons, those buttons you're supposed to put all over the web now with Facebook that say you like something. We do have Facebook integration because members want it. And it's pretty, you know, it's cool to publish to your feed a review that you've written on library thing. You know, you can count me in the rank of skeptics, generally speaking, when it comes to online privacy and just sharing. So yeah. So I'm logging into my Facebook and showing you a review that I just posted. There it is. You can post a review to library thing like that. Excuse me, to Facebook like that. And then your friends can jump to it. We also have Twitter integration. It's now broken, but it'll be back in a day or two. And you know, there's lots of cool stuff we can do integrating with the world, but yeah, I'm a little bit wary of some of it. Great. Another project that I've seen you do periodically, and if I got the term wrong, please correct me, but sort of a flash mob cataloging? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you explain that a little bit? I love those. Yeah, so basically we, I'm gonna Google it here. The idea of flash mob cataloging is somebody announces that they have a collection which needs to be cataloged. And it can be all kinds of things. I have two examples here. So somebody announces they have a collection that needs to be cataloged and we show up and catalog it. We might be just members of the community. I've been involved in maybe a half to a third of them, but it's taken place all over the country. Many of them have not involved any library staff at all. Here's a Rhode Island Audubon Society that we showed up with about 20 people cataloged the whole Audubon Society in a day. Here's a church that we did in Massachusetts where we cataloged it. More and more I'm seeing around me these institutional collections. The library thing is fundamentally for people, but within half a mile of me there are two churches that have used library thing to catalog their collections, neither of which were inspired by me. There's an Irish Heritage Center that's cataloged their collection. And one way or another it's a great activity to get together on a weekend and get a bunch of people to catalog books together. And library thing, as I say, is a community that if you wanna do that, we'll probably find you some people who wanna do that. And this is not something that we're talking about as a pay service. This is people out of the goodness of their heart just showing up and helping these little independent type places that need it. Yeah, I know, it's just showing up. I mean, this picture here is like, I guess there I am and there's two other employees, but most of these people are just people who love library thing or some of them are parishioners at the church. I have to say the first church we ever did, we thought we were helping out this poor, bedraggled church and it turned out to be the richest Episcopal church in Massachusetts, but they needed our help anyway. And yeah, I mean, library thing has a lot of this. We've also done flash mobs just on the site where we'll take a library and we'll do it in one day. So we did the John F. Kennedy 1963 White House Library which was published in the limited edition. And we just took a day and we just put the whole thing up. So there's lots of different ways that library thing members are helping each other out and doing cool book stuff. I think it's one of the coolest things that you guys do is when people just come at it and just do this. Yeah, I'm waiting for one to be like in Nebraska or something. Okay, go ahead. That's church news in the summer. Yes. Yeah, we just need somebody else to organize it, I think. Okay, here's a question kind of out of left field cause I know you're constantly listening to your members and getting suggestions from them on how library things should change or what features should be added. What's maybe the oddest request you've gotten from somebody that either you ended up implementing cause you just had never would have thought about in a million years or said that is so crazy we're never going to do that. Yeah, so this was a suggestion actually of my best friend which he said as a joke but actually did and that is you're all familiar with the idea of if you like this book you're gonna like that book. Well, the logic of that algorithm is very simple. If you flip it on its head you get, if you like this book you're gonna hate that book and it's equally valid statistically. So here's the dangerous book for boys. If you like that book you will not like Jennifer Wiener's Good in Bed or the erotic fantasy Cushie L's Dart by Jacqueline Cary. I don't know what purpose this serves but it's kind of fun. I have some of my favorite ones over on the right here like opposition between Emanuel Kant's critique of pure reason and shopaholic. So library thing loves to do fun weird cool things with data and showing you the books you should never ever read is a good example of that. Plus again, Amazon would never do it. But generally speaking, library thing is a very, I'm gonna click on my posts here. There's all these posts trying to improve the site telling me what's broken. Library thing is a very open community. We all take a lot of joy in doing what members think is cool. That was a perfect answer because I was gonna have you talk about the unsuggestor. I wasn't even trying to pack you into it because I love showing that feature when I get a chance to show a library thing to people. The feature that my friend actually suggested was if you're going to show the people who are most like you you should have a feature to show your nemesis. But we haven't done that because I think people might be a little bit annoyed by having library thing pick out their enemy or something. Well, yeah, it might be you and me over Star Wars books but well, and I like to say some readers advisory I absolutely hated this book. What should I read next? I mean, it's got possibilities. It might be a little extreme, but it's got possibilities. The cool thing to do with it is actually simply to expand yourself. We had members saying, let's all read our opposites. You can get the unsuggestor book by book but you can also get it for you personally. So let's see what my current unsuggestor is actually. I'm sure it's like knitting. Knitting is what I tend to get. Knitting or certain sorts of religion, I'd say. But the idea is maybe I should read that knitting book. Maybe I'd be a better person if I could understand the people who like knitting books. I haven't actually done it, but maybe I would do it. It's really interesting if you read a lot of politics and social stuff and you really wanna read the other side of something. Yeah, and I think that library thing, in general, library thing creates connections among likes. Right? There's this phenomenon where if you go onto the side and you're let's say you're an evangelical or let's say you only love theater books or whatever, you get this queer sense that the whole site is about you because the site is kind of always adjusting its content based upon you. But there are ways to get outside of that. And I think that what's called homophily, hanging out with people who are like you is half of the story and the other half is hanging out with people who are different. There you go. I should absolutely not read Jody Picose, my sister's keeper. And I can tell you that I will not. You have any more questions? It's a quarter of a dollar on that list. I mean, it might not be too bad. Yeah, I have one more question and I forgot to pre-load a photo just for proof, but and you're gonna have to explain yourself on this one. What's with the rhino? Yeah, so we just have a weird attitude towards life. Library thing shows up at all conferences with rhinos, giant inflatable rhinos. It came about because we didn't have anything to bring to the conference and the rules are very explicit about not bringing furniture. It has to be something that you can physically carry in by yourself or the unions get involved. So we started filling our booths with rhinos just to fill up the space and that's it. In general, I want library thing to be kind of the funny weird site and I think that's one example of it. Well, you are in charge. So, you know, mission accomplished. We will, for everybody who doesn't want to go hunting, we'll, to the bookmarks list for this week, we will post a photo of it. It's okay, I have a very good picture of us doing rhino tossing because we... Yes, there's rhino tossing. I was, they are sort of funny. I have a good picture from my Flickr stream of you and your rhino, so I'll make sure that everybody gets to see it happen. Listen, I wanna say that people should feel free to follow up with me with questions if they want to, Tim at librarything.com very easy to remember. But thank you so much for inviting me on today. Oh, yeah, welcome Tim and thanks for taking some time out of your day. We'll do one last check here to see we're kind of running a little out of time, see if there's any questions waiting in the queue here. And there was one question about the cost differences between libraries and individuals to which I'll just quickly answer, significant. And Tim, correct me if I'm wrong, but library thing for libraries, it really is kind of a library by library quote on the price, right? It is, I mean, library thing for libraries enhances your O-PAC in a very serious way. The minimum is usually $1,000, so it's a significant product, but it adds a lot of value to you and it prevents you from having to go out and buy something else. The other thing that's interesting about it is that there are all these things now, like Encore would be one example where vendors have decided that tags and other social stuff is good, so they just kind of cram it into their software. And I think those things are mostly just terrible. The idea of Encore is that if you have tagging, you're done, but tagging doesn't work if there's only five tags, if there's only 10 tags. In fact, having 10 tags done a book is worthless. You might as well forget them. You need hundreds or thousands of tags and what library thing provides, library thing for libraries provides is not so much the feature because people make features, but the enormous society and pool of data that stands behind the feature, which I think is the essence of social software is not the software, it's the social. We're not seeing any other questions in the queue, so Tim, I just want to say thanks again. This was great. We kind of told Tim we wanted a half hour out of him and we've taken the whole hour, but I've learned some things about library thing and I've been a member for several years now. Yes, so now I want to go and spend a lot of time playing with some of these things, these little features, fun things, things you can do. Yeah, and I'll also say I use it a lot. All of my new books, I get them home. I'm completely nuts. I put dust jacket covers on all my hard covers, but I also add them to library thing. And if for no other reason than on my phone while I'm in the bookstore, I can go, do I already own this? And I can pull up my library thing, and it will tell me whether or not I already own it. So I mean, that was worth every penny for me right there. Let me reveal one more secret, which is that library thing does cost $10 or $25 for a lifetime account. When you actually go to pay, you guys probably don't know this, but when you go to pay, it says, never mind, pay us whatever you want. So you can actually pay us as little as a dollar, but we get on average more than we asked for. So just another way that we do something a little bit different, and I think I'll help you in a cool way. I actually did notice that when I did my lifetime one, that it said it also had the option of that. And also I think that one or a higher suggested one had a little comment that says, thanks mom. Yes. What did you, and what did you pay? Oh, good. I think I did this. I can look it up. I paid 25 bucks. Yes, I did the suggested for lifetime, whatever that was. Yeah. But I've also purchased a QCAD, so I've given more. Hi. Thanks again Tim. Yeah, we're gonna take, go ahead. I'll see anyone at ALA who's there, bye. Yep. Okay, thanks Tim. We're gonna take Tim, the control back here. As usual, I did plan sort of some other things to talk about, but our hour is pretty much up. I do want to say that we will have bookmarks up the library thing, a photo of Tim and his rhino. And we can actually, we can show you that real quick. Oh, got Tim. Tim, I need to make you a presenter first. Okay, we're gonna provide a link to it. We're having a little technical issues here. We will have booked up. There's some other issues that you may be interested in. Those links will go with the recording. I'm just showing them here real quick. Some of these I might save for next month. Haven't decided who. We're gonna talk to you next month. Although, I do have an idea for next month. I don't know how many of you are aware of One Book One Twitter going on right now. I have been in contact with the guy who was running that and we might be able to get him for an interview next month. So we'll keep you posted on that as soon as we know one way or another. So, Kristy, you wanna wrap this up? She's trying one more thing. Oh, okay, there's a picture of Tim and Rhino. Yes, thank you very much, Tim, for speaking with us today. I think it was great that we had that very awesome long introduction to what you're doing. There's Tim and his Rhino. And we'll be joining us next week when it will be Michael again, talking about participating in the Creative Commons next Wednesday at 10 a.m. Central Time at your local computer. Yep. Thank you very much and see you next week. Bye-bye.