This month’s NetConnect is centered around the Social Catalog, and its release was conveniently timed to our LTFL debut. I wrote a sidebar to John Blyberg’s must-read article on open APIs (go, now, read it). My little sidebar is down at the bottom of Blyberg’s article. I asked for and received permission to post the unedited version here:

Our ILSs are tiny monopolies. Sure, we could migrate to another company, or even make the leap to an open-source alternative, but we know and our vendors know that for the most part, once we have invested in a system, we are not likely to go anywhere. As libraries leverage various 2.0 technologies to reach out to patrons, push our services and create new avenues for our presence in our communities (real and virtual), we are saddled with catalogs that are 1.0 at best.

Enter LibraryThing for Libraries. LibraryThing is Web 2.0 for bibliophiles and LibraryThing for Libraries is Library 2.0 for the OPAC. Tim Spalding and his excellent team should give our ILS vendors pause–more than being a third party vendor, they represent a new way of bringing innovation to the catalog. Thorny issues like pricing and usability are all hashed out on the Thingology blog and list servs; transparency is a given. The entire LibraryThing for Libraries experience has been an exercise in the application of radical trust.

Danbury Public Library was the first beta tester of LibraryThing for Libraries to go live with LibraryThing data in our catalog. LibraryThing for Libraries has brought fun, the wisdom of crowds and informal, natural language subject descriptors to our OPAC.

The cliff’s notes version of LibraryThing for Libraries (for details, I recommend the LibraryThing for Libraries site at http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries): LibraryThing has over 200,000 users who have cataloged their personal libraries with 18 million tags (as of this writing; in the last week, a million tags were added). The first widget is the “Other Editions and Translations” which links to other copies of a book in our catalog as a sort of FRBR light tool. LibraryThing’s incredibly rich user-generated data has given rise to an excellent Suggestor and the second widget, “Similar Books” a reader’s advisory tool that offers reading suggestions and invites our patrons to explore our catalog through the recommendations of 200,000 other readers. The last widget is perhaps the most intriguing. Tags and the tag browser bring the cataloging efforts of LibraryThing’s thousands of users into our OPAC. Click on a tag associated with a book and the tag browser opens and provides a list of all the other books in the library with that same tag. The tag browser also provides a tag search engine, which has created an entirely new way to navigate our catalog.

The implementation of LibraryThing for Libraries was very simple for us at DPL: copy and paste. LibraryThing’s data does not interfere with our records; it merely appears next to them and enhances them. A few lines of javascript generate the three widgets and the work is done by LibraryThing’s servers. In the first week, the LibraryThing developers have made improvements to speed and usability, both of which were initially listed as problems on the Thingology blog. Its is nearly impossible to imagine a ILS company making these kinds of improvements independently, no hold times or support tickets needed.   

Shortly after LibraryThing data became available in our catalog, a colleague and I worked together to help a patron gather information about Ellis Island. In addition to non-fiction, she needed a historical novel that centered on Ellis Island. Several catalog searches proved fruitless. We have non-fiction and modern novels that center around Ellis Island, but we weren’t finding the magic combination of historical fiction and Ellis Island. Using the new data and tag browser at our fingertips, we looked for all books that had been tagged with Ellis Island. Island of Tears by Troy Soos is a historical mystery about Ellis Island and a family of immigrants. Its LC subject heading is Immigrants — United States – Fiction. However, it is tagged Ellis Island. Could we have found this book without the tag browser? Of course. Once we had given up on searching for novels about Ellis Island, we likely would have looked for novels about immigrants. However, LibraryThing for Libraries led us to this book before our patron’s ride showed up and before frustration set in. More than helping the staff, the friendly interface and usable language of the tag browser puts powerful and easy searching into the hands of our patrons. In addition to the enhanced findablity within our catalog, LibraryThing for Libraries has brought funability, a term coined by Tim Spalding to describe the joy of discovery possible on LibraryThing.

As the library community strives to create our ideal next generation catalog, we are hampered by our lack of time, money and collective programming ability. Until we and our vendors heed John Blyberg’s excellent rallying call for truly library-centric innovation, we have to find other ways. LibraryThing for Libraries is blazing the way to catalog of the future. Not only by shaking up how our catalogs work, but also in the way they do business: by building partnerships with libraries, librarians and patrons.