Overdue Ideas

What is LibraryThing?

• 450,000 registered users
• 28 million books
• 37 million tags
• 50+ imitators
• LibraryThing is your friend

LibraryThing use often follows the pattern:

• Personal cataloging
• Social networking
• Social Cataloging

Social cataloging happens in both implicit and explicit ways.

Using examples of ‘Thomas Jefferson‘ and other famous users - where their library collections have been added to LibraryThing

LibraryThing has ‘common knowledge’ fields - things such as characters etc.

A page such as http://www.librarything.com/series/Star+Wars contains more knowledge about the Star Wars series of books than anywhere else in the world.

Showing the power of librarything - tags, bringing together editions etc.

The ‘tag war’ is over. Tim does not believe tags are ‘better’ than subjects - but tags are just great for finding stuff. If you care about finding stuff not asserting ontological reality - then tags are great - you just have to spend some time using them to see this.

The physical basis of classification:

• A book has 3-6 subject (’cos that what fits on a card)
• Subjects are equally true (can’t express degrees of relation to a subject - either a book is about it or not - black and white)
• Subjects never change (once subjects are allocated you don’t go back - even if terminology changes on in the real world)
• Only librarians get to add subjects
• There is only one answer - someone ‘wins’
• You don’t get a say in how books are classified - you don’t want users writing on the cards - but not relevant in virtual environment
• Only books are cataloged
• Cataloging has to be done in the library
• Most librarian can’t help you, each other, themselves
• Libraries are NOT good at sharing metadata (contradicting Jennifer) - we tend to pull down records from a central source - very few libraries push back
• Record creating and editing can’t be distribute
• Record sharing can’t be shared freely

Two futures:

• The world ends
• You (catalogers) are paid less
• Programmers still get paid
• You move up the stack
• An IT-industry analogy - with open source software
• Demand increasing
• Low leve work and data becomes commoditized, distributed, free
• You move higher, get paid more

Tim wants a new shelf order:

• Replaces Dewey
• Free (Open Source)
• Modern
• Humble - not trying to model the whole world
• Decided socially, level by level
• Tested against the world
• Assignment is distributed
• I write the code
• You (cataloguers) be Jimmy Wales (audience asked - who is Jimmy Wales - one of the founders of wikipedia) - look over it, but has no power!

written by ostephens