Hooray! More LibraryThing for Libraries libraries!

Bedford, Waterford and Deschute have gone live.

We’re all pretty geographically diverse, but we should meet up for virtual drinks sometime. I’ll be sending you all your secret decoder rings.

Since our little club is expanding rapidly, perhaps this is a good time to share my Friday evening adventure. On Friday afternoon, I thought it might be a good idea to append our new bibs to the info already on LT’s servers. When I went to export them, I realized that I had originally exported only ISBNs, but the upload wanted ISBN, title and author. I recreated the file to export and uploaded it, being careful to choose “append”. I got an error message about mapping. I checked the file and saw that my delimiters were wacky. So, I recreated the file, changing the delimiters to commas. Upload the new file. Nope, same error message.

At that point, I felt a tingle of dread in my spine. Did I choose append the second time or accidentally leave it on overwrite? Well, it didn’t work, so it shouldn’t matter, right? Except the error message was about mapping, not uploading. Mild panic set in as I sent Tim and Altay a message saying “I may have broken everything.” I checked the catalog and everything was okay. LT checked their end and everything looked okay. I left work for the day.

One of the longest stretches of offline time in my day is after work. My drive home takes an hour and I often go to the gym without checking my email. From there, I often come home again, clean up and eat dinner before I check my email. Particularly on Friday nights. When I finally did check my email, there were about 8 kazillion messages from LibraryThing. Oh, yes, I had toasted our data. I nuked it so effectively that it took a bit for the huge deletion to show up on their end.

I called Tim and responded to his pleasant, professional “Hello, this is Tim Spalding” with “Ohmygodi’msuchanidiot! Um, it’s Kate. Hi.” In the end, it was only down for a couple of hours. I exported all of our data again and uploaded it. Getting the delimiters to work was a bit tricky, but Tim gave me the ASCII for tab (it’s 11) and space (40). He even tolerated my dog’s need to bark while I’m on the phone. (It is *imperative* that I be alerted to the neighbor’s activities while trying to fix a giant mistake. They are weeding their garden and other people- strangers!- are walking by. This could not be more important! Unless it was the squirrels plotting their eventual overthrow of the human race.)

A learning experience, to be sure. For all the new and future LT libraries: consider me the beta tester for stupid mistakes. I’m on the bleeding edge of ways to mess up your new and improved social catalog.