Superpatron - Edward Vielmetti is Mobilizing the Friends of the Library

LibraryThing has a new API for books info

Tim Spalding noted a new LibraryThing books API, intended for use for designing widgets for a browser.

I haven't dug into it yet, but what I told him is that I'd love to end up with some relatively easy-to-type URL that would let me make links to LibraryThing, Amazon, and the Ann Arbor District Library, all with a nice cover image. (For AADL I should be also able to get title availability.) It looks doable, but I probably need to write down more about that to make sense of it for anyone else.

A good example of this code in use is the CoverFlip sample app that MMcM put together.

More, I'm sure, to come; for now see the api developers group.

Mashups: what happened?

The Krafty Librarian, a medical librarian in Ohio, asks what happened to library mashups

I recently read where the Journal of Biomedical Informatics recently had a call for papers for their special issue on Semantic Biomedical Mashups. I look forward to reading it when it comes out. However, this has me thinking. Where are all the library mashups? Talis had the Mashing up the Library competition last year, but I haven't seen any information on it for this year. The Talis Mashing of the Library competition boards are silent. The last post was made by David Rothman over 27 weeks ago. The Second OCLC Research Software Contest ran from July 1, 2006 through September 2006, however I haven't heard anything about it this year.

Here's some possible answers, but by no means all of them.

People building book finding systems started building in things into their tools rather than having to wait for users to mash things together. LibraryThing has scooped up a bunch of good ideas, and Book Burro continues to make almost all of my earlier fussing around with Greasemonkey unnecessary. When software developers listen to the feedback loop from their customers, it's not so necessary for those folks to write code to get their ideas in play.

Library systems are woeful in general for being easily reachable by ordinary mortals, in part because the book finding systems in them are designed primarily as hermetically sealed units with proprietary and inward-facing programming interfaces. So there aren't a lot of hooks to hook in on.

People are lazy, and when they've suitably scratched the mashup itch to solve the problems they see around them, they go off to the next thing (twitter, facebook, etc).

(hm, is there a super-easy twitter library mashup just waiting to happen? rss feed of something + twitterfeed? can't do every new book, but perhaps some subset...cookery? knitting? hmm)

Mostly, though, these sort of things are just happening (and much more so than in 2005 or 2006), and it's not notable that it happens to be a mashup - the notable part is that library directors are blogging, library patrons are writing book reviews, and the like. Perhaps the next steps are micro-steps, things like storytime hours being a one-click add to your calendar using a tool like IBM's Operator plugin for Firefox.

Thomas Jefferson's library on LibraryThing

I delight, knowing
That my library lives on,
On the Internets.

http://www.librarything.com/profile/ThomasJefferson

Top tags: politics (1,059), geography (237), religion (213), american geography (201), languages (155), american history (135), agriculture (129), technical arts (129), medicine (127), Foreign History (126)

My library is being cataloged by helpful Thingamabrarii from the "I See Dead People['s Books]" group. The 6,487 volumes included here (eventually) are those I sold to the Library of Congress in 1815 for $23,950.

A note on my reviews: the Thingamabrarii are gleaning them from the excerpts printed in the annotated print edition of my catalog. They have been edited for capitalization, but otherwise have been left in original form.

What would TJ think? (CNET)

"Thomas Jefferson would have loved Google Book Search. He believed in contemplating every possible idea. He advocated the diffusion of knowledge and the power of universities to make that happen," Mary Sue Coleman told attendees of the annual conference of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers.

Technorati Tags: librarything, superpatron, thomas-jefferson

LibraryThing's new Common Knowledge

From their newsletter:

We're excited to release a new and addictive feature, "Common Knowledge." Basically, we've added a slew of fields to every author and book page, so anyone can add book awards, character names, biographical details on authors, book descriptions and more. It works like a wiki -- any member can add information, and any member can edit or revert the changes.

See the blog post about it.

I can vouch for the addictive part of it. The appropriate game is to identify a place where authors live (e.g Ann Arbor, MI) or a university they have gone to (e.g University of Michigan) and work your way through the world of LibraryThing filling in the gaps in their data. The easiest browser to see where the new data is coming in is the gender list; see new male, female authors.

Visibly missing is only an RSS feed for each of the new common knowledge pages (should be easy enough to do?). The authority control problem is making sure that all of the various variant ways to enter city, state, country get properly sorted together; is it "Ann Arbor, MI" or "Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America"? Autocompletion helps here.

Technorati Tags: librarything, authors, metadata, crowdsourcing

What's on my bookshelf? Book trading system

What's On My Bookshelf is a book trading system. It says about itself:

Trade books using a simple point system
Classify books by tags (simple words that describe the book) rather than by traditional categories
Get notified when books you want are available for trade
Meet People with similar reading interests

Their tag cloud shows the most popular:

fiction (1840)
Romance (1707)
adult (296)
Mystery (288)
Children (280)
Historical Romance (223)
Thriller (159)
Children's (155)
nonfiction (148)
Science Fiction (134)
suspense (122)
fantasy (119)
kids (109)

and indeed the front page of the system is dominated by romances.

LibraryThing is integrated with WhatsOnMyBookshelf - their post from about a year ago reads

WhatsOnMyBookShelf is the creation of Daniel Ostermayer. WOMB was the first swap site to link to LibraryThing, and has been quick to implement integration. Even cooler, LibraryThing's use of swap-site wish lists prompted them to create a wish list feature of their own. See? Openness sparks innovation! Lastly, WOMB is the only swap site that goes beyond Amazon; you can search the Library of Congress instead!

They run Adbrite advertising on the book pages.

Users get a "community investment" score based on their activity in the system; this is a reputation system based on activity, so you can tell who is busy in the system. They also provide a feedback mechanism with rankings 0-5 based on the transaction so that you can find (and avoid) people who don't play the game well.

The book detail pages - e.g. this one - do not trigger Book Burro. They probably could if the Book Burro page parser was a little bit more aggressive. The LibraryThing integration is the fast path to Book Burro since you can go WOMB -> LibraryThing -> Amazon through an easy click path.

Bookins - http://www.bookins.com - book trading

Bookins is a book trading site.  Here's what they have to say about themselves:

Bookins is the only book-trading service that helps you swap books with no fuss. There is no standing in line at the post office, and no need to follow-up with each member you exchange with. We provide the postage, track all shipments, and make sure you get back books of equal value. We even provide replacements at our expense for lost/damaged books.

They have been up and running on LibraryThing as a partner for about a year (since last year's Talk Like a Pirate Day):

Bookins bills itself as "easy, automated and fair." Its unique features include an algorithm for assigning points to books, so a new hardcover of Freakonomics is worth more than an old paperback Tom Clancy novel, and a $3.99 flat shipping rate, with package tracking right on the site. Again, it's nice to see that the dozen or so swap sites aren't just copying each other, but trying out different ideas.

Their key innovation is using self-printed accurate prepaid USPS postage for book returns, saving you a trip to the post office to weight and ship things.  From a USPS publication:

Putting good books in the hands of eager readers presented a shipping challenge for entrepreneur Mitchell Silverman. But with the help of USPS Web Tools, his company, Bookins, is able to do just that. USPS Web Tools allow customers to print out their shipping labels while remaining on the Bookins site. It’s a service Silverman depends on, and he’s never been disappointed.

There's a patent application on Method and apparatus for bartering items #20060026077

According to a computer-implemented approach for bartering items between customers, customers engage in the exchange of items wherein the system determines the parameters of the exchange. According to the approach, customers provide item selection criteria to a provider indicating items the customers desire to receive and items the customers are willing to send. In response to the item delivery criteria being satisfied, the provider prompts a customer to send an item to another customer, and the customer prompted by the provider sends the item to the other customer over a delivery channel. Provider determines the point value of the item sent and gives points to the customer sending the item and charges points from the customer receiving the item.

Technorati Tags: bookins, librarything, mitchell-s-silverman, barter, usps, usps-web-tools, uspto, patents, books, book-trading

Google Book Search adds personal library

From Google Operating System:

Google Book Search has an incredibly useful new feature that lets you build a virtual library of your favorite books. You can import the books if you have a list of ISBNs or search them and click on "Add to library".

Your library has a public URL you can share with other people (here's mine) and even a feed. You can also write reviews, rate the books or categorize them using tags. Probably the most important reason you should build the library is because it becomes searchable. Imagine being able to find a scene from one of your books without knowing its title and by typing some keywords that describe the scene. Of course, Google didn't index all the books in the world, so many of your favorite books aren't yet searchable.

The biggest list of ISBNs I have is in LibraryThing. I love LibraryThing - tags! more tags! etc. - but sometimes I just want to key in some search terms and get back some likely results. I didn't see a direct ISBN exporter from LibraryThing, but I got the same results from this setting, using a custom field setting for "E" and then cut and paste into the Google import box (carefully, avoiding stray crap):