LibraryThing is a
social cataloging
A social cataloging application is a web application designed to help users to catalog things such as books, films, music albums, etc. owned or otherwise of interest to them. The phrase refers to two characteristics that generally arise from a mult ...
web application
A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection.
History
In earlier computing models like client-serve ...
for storing and sharing book catalogs and various types of book
metadata
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
. It is used by authors, individuals, libraries, and publishers.
Based in
Portland, Maine
Portland is the largest city in the U.S. state of Maine and the seat of Cumberland County. Portland's population was 68,408 in April 2020. The Greater Portland metropolitan area is home to over half a million people, the 104th-largest metropol ...
, LibraryThing was developed by Tim Spalding and went live on August 29, 2005, on a freemium subscriber business model, because "it was important to have customers, not an 'audience' we sell to advertisers." They focused instead on making a series of products for academic libraries. Motivated by the cataloguing opportunities and financial challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, the service went "free to all" on March 8, 2020, while maintaining a promise to never use advertising on registered users. As of February 2021, it has 2,600,000 users and over 155 million books catalogued, drawing data from Amazon and from thousands of libraries that use the
Z39.50 cataloguing protocol.
Features
The primary feature of LibraryThing (LT) is the cataloging of books, movies, music and other media by importing data from libraries through
Z39.50 connections and from six
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...
stores. Library sources supply
Dublin Core
220px, Logo image of DCMI, which formulates Dublin Core
The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen "core" elements (properties) for describing resources. This fifteen-element Dublin Core has ...
and
MARC Marc or MARC may refer to:
People
* Marc (given name), people with the first name
* Marc (surname), people with the family name
Acronyms
* MARC standards, a data format used for library cataloging,
* MARC Train, a regional commuter rail system o ...
records to LT; users can import information from over 2000 libraries, including the
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...
,
Canadian National Catalogue,
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...
,
National Library of Australia
The National Library of Australia (NLA), formerly the Commonwealth National Library and Commonwealth Parliament Library, is the largest reference library in Australia, responsible under the terms of the ''National Library Act 1960'' for "mainta ...
, and
Yale University
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...
. Should a record not be available from any of these sources, it is also possible to input the book information manually via a blank form.
Each work may comprise different editions, translations, printings, audio versions, etc. Members are encouraged to add publicly visible reviews, descriptions, Common Knowledge and other information about a work; ratings, collections and tags help categorization. Discussion in the forums is also encouraged.
Items are classified using the Melvil Decimal System, based on the out-of-copyright 1922 edition of the
Dewey Decimal Classification
The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), colloquially known as the Dewey Decimal System, is a proprietary library classification system which allows new books to be added to a library in their appropriate location based on subject.
Section 4.1 ...
with modifications for standard spelling of division names (as opposed to the original names, which were spelled in accordance with Dewey's
advocated spelling reforms), and modernised terminology.
Social features
LibraryThing's social features have been compared to bookmark manager
Del.icio.us
Delicious (stylized del.icio.us) was a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, ...
and the collaborative music service
Last.fm
Last.fm is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the tracks the user listens to, e ...
. Similar book cataloging sites include
aNobii
Anobii (stylized, anobii) is a social networking site aimed at readers. Its website was launched in 2006 by Greg Sung. It was acquired by the publisher Mondadori in 2014 from a venture backed by HMV Group, HarperCollins, Penguin , and Random H ...
,
BookLikes
BookLikes is a "social cataloging" website founded in June 2011 by Dawid Piaskowski, a software engineer, e-business analyst and entrepreneur, and Joanna Grzelak-Piaskowska, a linguist and literary scholar. The website allows individuals to freely ...
,
Goodreads
Goodreads is an American social cataloging website and a subsidiary of Amazon that allows individuals to search its database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and read ...
,
Libib,
Shelfari
Shelfari was a social cataloging website. Shelfari users built virtual bookshelves of the titles they owned or had read, and could rate, review, tag, and discuss their books. Users could also create groups that other members could join, creat ...
(now merged with Goodreads), and weRead.
TinyCat
In 2016, LibraryThing launche
TinyCat an
OPAC
The online public access catalog (OPAC), now frequently synonymous with '' library catalog'', is an online database of materials held by a library or group of libraries. Online catalogs have largely replaced the analog card catalogs previously ...
designed for the cataloging and circulation of libraries of up to 20,000 items.
TinyCat is marketed towards small independent libraries, such as schools, community centers, religious institutions, academic departments, as well as individuals.
Ownership
LibraryThing is majority owned by founder Tim Spalding.
Online bookseller
AbeBooks bought a 40% share in LibraryThing in May 2006 for an undisclosed sum. AbeBooks became a subsidiary of Amazon in 2008. In January 2009,
Cambridge Information Group
Cambridge Information Group (CIG) is a privately held global investment firm focusing on information services, education and technology. It began as a firm providing services to academic publishers. It is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland.
As ...
acquired a minority stake in LibraryThing, and their subsidiary
Bowker Bowker is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
* Alan Bowker, Canadian diplomat and educator
*Albert H. Bowker (1919–2008), American educator
*Aldrich Bowker (1875–1947), American actor
* Art Bowker (born 1961), American writer
* ...
became the official distributor to libraries.
Publicity
At the end of June 2006, LibraryThing was subject to the
Slashdot effect
The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, occurs when a popular website links to a smaller website, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily become unavailable. Thi ...
from a ''
Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'' article. The site's developers added servers to compensate for the increased traffic. In December of the same year, the site received yet more attention from
Slashdot
''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally advertised itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories concerning science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evalu ...
over its UnSuggester feature, which draws suggestions from books least likely to appear in the same catalog as a given book.
See also
*
Bibliographic database
A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, p ...
*
Collective intelligence
Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence (GI) that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiology, politic ...
*
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digita ...
*
Enterprise bookmarking Enterprise bookmarking is a method for Web 2.0 users to tag, organize, store, and search bookmarks of both web pages on the Internet and data resources stored in a distributed database or fileserver. This is done collectively and collaboratively i ...
*
Folksonomy
Folksonomy is a classification system in which end users apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. Over time, this can give rise to a classification system based on those tags ...
*
List of social networking services
A social networking service is an online platform that people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections.
This is a li ...
*
OPAC
The online public access catalog (OPAC), now frequently synonymous with '' library catalog'', is an online database of materials held by a library or group of libraries. Online catalogs have largely replaced the analog card catalogs previously ...
(Online Public Access Catalog)
*
Tags
*
Virtual community
A virtual community is a social network of individuals who connect through specific social media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. Some of the most pervasive virtual communi ...
References
Further reading
* Wenzler, J
LibraryThing and the library catalog: adding collective intelligence to the OPAC ''A Workshop on Next Generation Libraries''. San Francisco State University CARL NITIG; September 7, 2007.
* Hvass, Anna (2008)
Cataloging with LibraryThing: as easy as 1,2,3!''Library Hi Tech News'', 25 (10), pp. 5–7.
External links
*
{{amazon
Companies based in Maine
Library 2.0
American book websites
Internet properties established in 2005
Amazon (company)
Social cataloging applications
Multilingual websites
2005 establishments in Maine
American companies established in 2005