{"id":77,"date":"2008-06-29T18:23:15","date_gmt":"2008-06-30T01:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/?p=77"},"modified":"2008-06-29T18:23:15","modified_gmt":"2008-06-30T01:23:15","slug":"ala-2008-the-future-of-cataloging-as-seen-from-librarything-tim-spalding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2008\/06\/ala-2008-the-future-of-cataloging-as-seen-from-librarything-tim-spalding\/","title":{"rendered":"ALA 2008: The Future of Cataloging (as seen from LibraryThing) &#8211; Tim Spalding"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/\">What is LibraryThing?<\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>450,000 registered users<\/li>\n<li>28 million books<\/li>\n<li>37 million tags<\/li>\n<li>50+ imitators<\/li>\n<li>LibraryThing is your friend \ud83d\ude42<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>LibraryThing use often follows the pattern:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Personal cataloging<\/li>\n<li>Social networking<\/li>\n<li>Social Cataloging<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Social cataloging happens in both implicit and explicit ways.<\/p>\n<p>Using examples of &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/profile\/thomasjefferson\">Thomas Jefferson<\/a>&#8216; and other famous users &#8211; where their library collections have been added to LibraryThing<\/p>\n<p>LibraryThing has &#8216;common knowledge&#8217; fields &#8211; things such as characters etc.<\/p>\n<p>A page such as <a title=\"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/series\/Star+Wars\" href=\"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/series\/Star+Wars\">http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/series\/Star+Wars<\/a> contains more knowledge about the Star Wars series of books than anywhere else in the world.<\/p>\n<p>Showing the power of librarything &#8211; tags, bringing together editions etc.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8216;tag war&#8217; is over. Tim does not believe tags are &#8216;better&#8217; than subjects &#8211; but tags are just great for finding stuff. If you care about finding stuff not asserting ontological reality &#8211; then tags are great &#8211; you just have to spend some time using them to see this.<\/p>\n<p>The physical basis of classification:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A book has 3-6 subject (&#8216;cos that what fits on a card)<\/li>\n<li>Subjects are equally true (can&#8217;t express degrees of relation to a subject &#8211; either a book is about it or not &#8211; black and white)<\/li>\n<li>Subjects never change (once subjects are allocated you don&#8217;t go back &#8211; even if terminology changes on in the real world)<\/li>\n<li>Only librarians get to add subjects<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>There is only one answer &#8211; someone &#8216;wins&#8217;<\/li>\n<li>You don&#8217;t get a say in how books are classified &#8211; you don&#8217;t want users writing on the cards &#8211; but not relevant in virtual environment<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<li>Only books are cataloged<\/li>\n<li>Cataloging has to be done in the library<\/li>\n<li>Most librarian can&#8217;t help you, each other, themselves<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>Libraries are NOT good at sharing metadata (contradicting Jennifer) &#8211; we tend to pull down records from a central source &#8211; very few libraries push back<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<li>Record creating and editing can&#8217;t be distribute<\/li>\n<li>Record sharing can&#8217;t be shared freely<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Two futures:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The world ends<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>You (catalogers) are paid less<\/li>\n<li>Programmers still get paid<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<li>You move up the stack<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>An IT-industry analogy &#8211; with open source software<\/li>\n<li>Demand increasing<\/li>\n<li>Low leve work and data becomes commoditized, distributed, free<\/li>\n<li>You move higher, get paid more<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Tim wants a new shelf order:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Replaces Dewey<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>Free (Open Source)<\/li>\n<li>Modern<\/li>\n<li>Humble &#8211; not trying to model the whole world<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<li>Decided socially, level by level<\/li>\n<li>Tested against the world<\/li>\n<li>Assignment is distributed<\/li>\n<li>I write the code<\/li>\n<li>You (cataloguers) be Jimmy Wales (audience asked &#8211; who is Jimmy Wales &#8211; one of the founders of wikipedia) &#8211; look over it, but has no power!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><div class=\"wlWriterSmartContent\" id=\"scid:0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:6b556ced-ce48-4788-9764-17b0cc859008\" style=\"padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px\">Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/ala2008\" rel=\"tag\">ala2008<\/a><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is LibraryThing? 450,000 registered users 28 million books 37 million tags 50+ imitators LibraryThing is your friend \ud83d\ude42 LibraryThing use often follows the pattern: Personal cataloging Social networking Social Cataloging Social cataloging happens in both implicit and explicit ways. Using examples of &#8216;Thomas Jefferson&#8216; and other famous users &#8211; where their library collections have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-ala2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}