Are you the kind of person who just can’t help taking a look at the bookshelf every time you walk into someone’s house? Do you secretly wonder whether you should arrange your books by author, title or edition? Do you find yourself piling up the “to read” books by your bed, and adding to the pile every weekend? If so, then LibraryThing is the space for you.

A combination of catalogue and social space, LibraryThing is changing the way people think about sharing information about books. It’s the place where people who speak about the future of libraries hang out, as well as the place for people who are turned on by finding obscure Middle Eastern cookbooks. LibraryThingers enter photo contests on Flickr, share their books on BookMooch and buy what they find in LibraryThing on AbeBooks. There is even a LibraryThing in Second Life which allows users to link their libraries to their SL profiles.

With over 17 million books catalogued (that’s more than Harvard’s library) it’s also a place where people get to play with metadata. Tags, categories and ratings are part of the fun of the place, as are functions like Unsuggester, (which allows you to find out which books to avoid like the plague) and an author picture gallery of open licensed photos. Founder and creator Tim Spalding spoke to Rebecca Kahn about the future of libraries, tag-mashing and user-generated translations.


Developing communities is something we at iCommons think about a lot. When LT first started, did you have to actively 'grow' the community? Or did people just take to it?
I started out a hobby project, not a job, so I was relaxed about it. But I did send some emails to people I thought might be interested. Making an earlier site (Isidore of Seville, highly-focused web directories) I had learned that people don't mind emails out of the blue, so long as they're about a passion of theirs and you speak in a human voice. I took great care not to write "form letters," but to engage with people as one book-lover to another. Many were bloggers, and they proved the magic sauce that got LibraryThing going.

LibraryThing is available in about 30 different languages, and much of the translation work was done by volunteer LT users. Did you ever intend to create different language version of the site, or was it a spontaneous project that originated with the users themselves?
*ALL* the translation is by the users. (The only language I'd be qualified to do is Latin and Neo-Latin leaves me cold.) But it wasn't a spontaneous thing. We had to build the features. Basically, this involved turning

echo "Add books?"

into

echo translate ("Add books?")

ten thousand times. Translation is basically a wiki, with a voting feature to take certain agreed-upon snippets off the table. It's given us the biggies, of course, like French, German but also Danish and even Welsh.

What amazes me about LT is the diversity of content. You can spend days just looking for cookbooks, or obscure texts, or bestsellers. It's a wonderfully democratic space (and lets face it, book people can be snobby). Did you ever expect such a wide mix of people to use your site?
The scale was a surprise. When I added the first social features I made an icon for when more than one person had the book. The graphic contained the number of other users who had it, a different graphic for each number. It had space for two digits. I actually scotched this before it went live, but it gives you some idea what my expectations were. I wasn't thinking there would ever be a book with more than 99 owners!

Regarding diversity, however, I was only half-surprised. I knew how many books were out there. The "long tail" of books in people's home libraries is MUCH longer than the long tail of commerce. But I was pleasantly surprised to see the site embraced by people with different interests. It started out with a somewhat academic cast, but it quickly acquired strong delegations interested in Evangelical theology, knitting, manga and other topics alien to my experience.

There's a distinction between information about books, and the information that's in books. Often, it's the in part that gets people upset because that's where copyright starts becoming an issue. But, asking as a non-librarian, do people get sticky about sharing information about books?
They do. Amazon data is quite free, but library data isn't. Almost all libraries in the United States and many overseas are members of an organization called OCLC, a central repository and clearing-house for bibliographic data. OCLC helps libraries use each other's work so that every library in the United States doesn't have to catalogue their books ab novo.

The trade-off is a restrictive licence. The bargain made sense when storing and processing information was expensive work and sharing data means shipping physical cards around the country. But OCLC is a fine idea out of touch with the present. Worst of all, we're paying to perpetuate it. OCLC's biggest contributor is the Library of Congress , followed by state schools and universities that get public money. That's not right.

There are now efforts underway to break this system. The Internet Archive's Open Library project is accumulating records, start with the Library of Congresses, and basically daring OCLC to sue them. The legal issues are complex and nobody knows how such a suit would fall. (It's less about copyright than about licence.) I'm surprised they haven't sued yet. OCLC once sued a hotel that filled its
rooms with books and numbered them according to the Dewey Decimal System. Maybe they think Open Library will fail. Or maybe going after such an icon of freedom gives them pause.

LibraryThing avoids trouble by using data protocols that libraries have around to facilitate non-OCLC data exchange, with other libraries and citation software like Endnote. We haven't signed any licence with OCLC, so we're not breaking any licences. In theory, OCLC could tell the libraries to cut us off. So far, libraries welcome what we're doing, and indeed frequently send us connection details. If LibraryThing got into the business of "real" cataloguing, the dynamic might shift. OCLC has no particular interest in private cataloguing and our "small libraries" (churches, clubs and house museums) aren't on their radar.

At school, we all learnt that a library is the first place you go to if you want information. Then the digital era came along, and people predicted the end of the library. But aren't sites like LT, and Open Library and Wikipedia (and millions of others) are libraries, but in a different space? It seems to me that the process of searching for information, and having it lead you to other sources is the same. Do you think people are becoming more accustomed to thinking about the Internet as viable spaces that compliment libraries?
I've said and written a fair amount on these topics, but ultimately I'm not sure what the future holds for libraries. I go back and forth. Clearly the Internet is rewriting all the rules.

LibraryThing differs from Wikipedia and to some extent from Open Library in concentrating on the metadata. You cannot read any actual books on LibraryThing. We link to sites like Google Book Search, but I think we're going to continue to focus on with the metadata, not the data.

LibraryThing does, however, show what libraries can do, building better catalogue and integrating social relationships and social data into the discovery process. In this connection, we've recently started to sell something called LibraryThing for Libraries , which puts some of our data and services into the library catalogue.

Just from looking at some of the groups on LT, it seems as though some librarians have embraced the idea wholeheartedly, and are very active in the movement towards opening up access to knowledge and information. And yet, in the worlds of free culture and open access, they're often left out of the debates. Why do think this could be?
I think there's a good deal of mutual suspicion. Librarians have too often positioned themselves against the Internet, as an authoritative source of information against a sea of junk. Many in the technology world regard librarians as relics or not at all. They tend to reinvent the intellectual tools that librarians have used for centuries.

There's been a sea change in the last few years. A small army of forward-thinking librarians and people who work in libraries has arisen. They've started using the term Library 2.0. They work on projects together, have unconferences and work through issues together. They're all passionate about open solutions.

Libraries are slow-moving institutions, but change is happening. At the last two conferences I attended everyone was talking about how their library was looking at moving to one of the new open-source catalogue and library system (Evergreen, Koha ). I'm not sure how many are going to follow through, but this stuff is starting to reach critical mass.

Do you think LT is also providing a model to libraries on how data can successfully be opened, and shared?
Libraries have been sharing data intensively for over a century now—it's central to the profession. But their horizons have been narrow. I hope that we're doing something to expand them. Certainly I'm starting to hear others picking up and expanding on my argument for open data. And LibraryThing is many librarians' introduction to what unbound library data can do; it opens eyes. Lastly, we're taking some of the fear out of "user-generated content"--sharing with your patrons, not just other libraries.

We hope to inspire, but, as a private company, we can never be as open as libraries can be. Some of our data is free--either totally or free to libraries--but not all. Maybe the goal should for libraries to open up so much that LibraryThing starts looking evil.

One of my favourite features of LT are the statistics, the ability to look at tag clouds, numbers of books, how they're rated, use unsuggester etc. It's fun, but it's also really valuable information, that has been generated by LT users. Are publishers and booksellers making use of this information? And if so, how do you manage to balance sharing information with them (which is ultimately a good thing for people who like to read and buy books) and having them just use LT as a free alternative to doing research?
Thanks. Fun drives a lot of what we do. Our "Unsuggester" (people who read X DON'T read Y) is a classic example--it has no commercial value at all, and indeed would probably bankrupt any commercial bookseller that used it.

I know publishers are starting to use LibraryThing for market research. We have a lot of interesting statistics and tags are an interesting window into how their buyers see the world. We may add some special "pro" features for the top users, but we can't "capture" most of this value. That's fine. If publishing executives checked LibraryThing ever day, there's no way that doesn't help us a lot.

Although using the site is free, putting our data on an outside site is not. So, we're currently showing LibraryThing recommendations on AbeBooks.com pages, and BookFinder is starting to use our tags too. We plan to add other booksellers too.

You and your team and every LT user have built something that is very special. Do you ever just sit back and think "How the hell did I get here?"
I know just how I got here. It's that bucking bronco underneath me right now.

tags: Portland, Maine United States culture libraries social-networking books metadata

extracted from: