The FRBR Blog

Over at LibraryThing, Tim Spalding announced a new gizmo for libraries:

LibraryThing for Libraries is composed of a series of widgets, designed to enhancing library catalogs with LibraryThing data and functionality. The achievement is that the widgets require NO back-end integration.

We’re serious. Just add a single Javascript tag, and one tag for every widget you want to display and we do the rest. To make sure the widgets use your library’s version of a title and that some widgets only refer to books you have, you also need to upload a file with ISBNs in it—just ISBNs or all mixed together in MARC records or whatever. The whole thing should work with any catalog.

In a subsequent blog post there is a sample of the XML output the gizmo would offer.

Spalding did up a demo of what the gizmo would look like in action on a New York Public Library page, and you can see why I mention it here: he’s using thingISBN data to group together other manifestations of the same work under Related Editions.

It’s great he’s making this available, especially as XML so that libraries with programmers can do what they want with the data. Libraries without programmers can just bung in a line of HTML and get something that will help users. Or will it? Would they find it confusing? I wonder what usability testing will say. I see two reasons why LibraryThing’s service may not get much uptake from libraries.

First, they’re unable or scared to making the slightest change to their catalogue, especially from an organization that doesn’t have thousands of employees and doesn’t charge them lots of money.

Second, users may be confused by seeing a list of books that appear to be identical to the one they’re looking at. In Spalding’s example, if I’m an NYPL user looking for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, why would I follow any of the related links? Would it help if more information were there, such as if it’s a translation? That’s at the FRBR Expression level, and not available yet. Where thingISBN’s information is really needed is inside the workings of the catalogue, not pasted on top, but library systems vendors move slowly and most seem uninterested in FRBRizing.

That said, perhaps libraries running the free and open source systems Koha and Evergreen could sign up and work to get this data handled inside the catalogue, where it could be used to give the users better results, instead of just layering it on top.

However, the new gizmo is certainly a step in the right direction and congrats to LibraryThing.