Archive for the ‘awards’ Category

Monday, August 22nd, 2011

Series and Awards in Library Anywhere

We’ve recently integrated our newest LibraryThing for Libraries OPAC enhancement—Series and Awards—into Library Anywhere. This means that if your library is subscribing to Series and Awards and Library Anywhere, you’ll now see it not only in your web catalog, but also in Library Anywhere!

For example: scan this QR code with your phone to jump to the record for The Hunger Games in Chemeketa Cooperative Regional Library’s Library Anywhere catalog.

Scroll down the page to find series and awards data. You’ll see on that bib page any awards the book has won, and any series it’s part of. Click the award or series title, and you’ll then see all the books belonging to it (as in the screenshots below).

Series and Awards join the other LTFL enhancements already integrated into Library Anywhere for LTFL subscribers—reviews, tags, similar books, and other editions.

Email me (abby@librarything.com) with any questions about any of the LibraryThing for Libraries OPAC enhancements, or Library Anywhere! To subscribe, contact Peder Christensen at Bowker—toll-free at 877-340-2400 or email Peder.Christensen@bowker.com.

Labels: awards, library anywhere, librarything for libraries, series

Friday, June 24th, 2011

LibraryThing for Libraries-Spotlight Awards

We’ve just added a feature to spotlight certain awards within our Series and Awards LibraryThing for Libraries enhancement. The awards enhancement covers 25,000 different awards and honors—from the National Book Award and the Booker Prize to the Salon Book Award and New York Times Notable Book of the Year, or even Oprah’s Book Club selections.

While some books have received one or two different awards, others may have over twenty. By default, we only show the first few (alphabetically) on a book’s page in the catalog, with a “see more” link that expands to show all. Our new spotlighting feature allows a library to choose certain awards and force them to float to the top of this list.

An Australian library can, for example, highlight local awards, that may otherwise get lost in the list. Or perhaps it’s the month when the Orange Prize is picked, and you want to spotlight all the books on the longlist or short list.

To use this feature, go to the Series and Awards moderation page within the LTFL admin. Along with the moderation we’ve always provided (don’t think Oprah’s Book Club counts as an honor? Fine, remove it!), you’ll now see a ‘promote’ button. You can search for awards by name, or browse. Spotlighted awards will always be pushed to the top of the list, and will appear with a star icon next to them.

Labels: awards, librarything for libraries

Friday, March 18th, 2011

Introducing Series and Awards

We’ve added a new enhancement to LibraryThing for Libraries, which combines two complementary enhancements: Series and Awards.

The Series enhancement draws from more than 50,000 series, and displays it right in the catalog. We provide a short description of the series (where available) and any related series (for example, The Chronicles of Narnia in both chronological order and in publication order).

For a given book, we display the name of the series and then the titles of all the books within that series. As with all the LTFL enhancements, each title links to that book’s page within your catalog.

See, for example, the page for Thursday Next in Lost in a good book in the Chemeketa Cooperative Regional Library Service Catalog. The series enhancement (displayed on the left-hand side) tells you this book is in the Thursday Next series. Click that series name and you see the series browser, which displays all the titles in that series, and links to each book in the library’s catalog.  If a library doesn’t have a given book, we still list it, but without a link.

Chemeketa has chosen just to show the title of the series in the catalog, but you can also configure the enhancement to show a few “preview titles” and then a show more button which launches the series browser (as in the Pink Carnation screenshot to the right).

Some more examples of the Series enhancement in action on these book pages:

The Awards enhancement taps into more than 25,000 awards and honors. It covers a huge range of awards, from the National Book Award and the Booker Prize to the Salon Book Award and New York Times Notable Book of the Year, or even Oprah’s Book Club selections.

See the awards on these books:

Put it in your OPAC
For ordering information contact Peder Christensen at Bowker—toll-free at 877-340-2400 or email Peder.Christensen@bowker.com.

Questions? email me (abby@librarything.com)

Labels: awards, librarything for libraries, ltfl, series

Monday, December 8th, 2008

Randolph County Public Library wins award for using LTFL


Congratulations are in order for the very hip (pun intended for you OPAC geeks) Randolph County Public Library for receiving the Outstanding Library Service Innovation Award from the North Carolina Public Library Directors Association (NCPLDA) for their implementation of LibraryThing for Libraries.

They also won the Outstanding Library Promotional Project Award for their electronic newsletter and email alert service.

Well done, Randolph County Public Library!

UPDATE:
Coverage in the Randolph Guide newspaper.

Labels: awards, librarything for libraries, ltfl, ltfl libraries, North Carolina, randolph county public library

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Moving and Shaking!

I’m excited to say that Library Journal has picked me as one of their 2008 Movers and Shakers, “The People Shaping the Future of Libraries.” Here’s the full list, the intro and the blurb on me. (I’m on bottom right in the photo too!)

The full list makes for interesting reading. Jessamyn has a version of the list that includes names, not just our fanciful titles. (“Metadata Man”? Can’t I be “Spark Plug” or “On a mission?”) Certainly a lot more happens with libraries than I ever think about. Update: Bobbi Newman has a version with blogs too.

Movers and Shakers been going on since 2002, long before LibraryThing thrust me into the library world. A number of my favorite library bloggers and technologists have won it before, including Jessamyn West, Steven Cohen, John Blyberg, Meredith Farkas, Nicole Engard, Emily Lynema and Casey Bisson.

As much as I want to congratulate people, I know few of the current batch, and wouldn’t have much to add. I do know Josh Ferraro of LibLime. LibLime is the driving force behind the open-source library system, Koha, that is suddenly on everyone’s lips. We’re eager to get LibraryThing data into Koha—beyond LibraryThing for Libraries, which already works—but Liblime may be too busy scaling to write the code anytime soon.* Fortunately, unlike all the closed systems, if LibLime can’t do it, we can do it ourselves. That kinds of openness is just one of the many reasons Koha is taking over the world.

Four others caught my eye:

Marshall Shore (“The Man Who Said No to Dewey”). Shore is the guy behind Maricopa’s move from Dewey to a modified BISAC system. I have mixed feelings about BISAC, but Dewey needs to be replaced, and experiments are good. I met with a member of his team at a conference; I’m eager to get their system into LibraryThing and they indicated they were willing.

Maria Redburn, Bedford Public Library. I’ve never met Ms. Redburn, but Bedford, a small-ish town in Texas, was the second library to enhance their catalog with LibraryThing for Libraries. Apparently Redburn took over in rocky times–the town was considering outsourcing library management to a company in Delaware. She turned the library around, winning approval for local control, expanded service and a new focus on customer service. Good stuff!

Darci Hanning, the force behind the Plinkit project, which provides free, low-hassle websites for libraries. I only heard about them two days ago; Casey is a big fan, and has a blog post about it coming up.

Mark Greek, DC Public Library. Greek worked to rescue and preserve rare materials from the Georgetown Neighborhood Library, devastated in a fire. That was my local library when I lived in DC, so a big thumb-up from me!

As for me, I think the blurb hits all the right notes: LibraryThings roots in cataloging, the social aspects, LibraryThing for Libraries and MARCThing (launched, but not yet accessible outside). But the best part is the closing quote by Karen Schneider:

“Tim has ported the fun of reading to the web and in doing so honors the best of our profession and suggests a path for its future.”

As someone outside of the profession, that’s pretty gratifying to hear.**


*I need to dust off my PERL though!
**I’m also the first recipient from Maine, which seems wrong, both because there are a lot of innovative librarians in Maine and because I’m a “blow-in.”

Labels: awards, library journal, movers and shakers