LibraryThing for Libraries at Danbury Library
Danbury Library is the public library in Danbury, Connecticut, a city of about 80,000 people which is currently punching above its weight in the library world because it’s the first system to implement LibraryThing for Libraries, the new service offered by LibraryThing.
It looks very nice. Here are some sample pages:
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. (Strangely, the book is sixth in the result list for “azkaban,” but that’s because of their catalogue’s search, nothing to do with LibraryThing.) Note the “Other editions and translation” section, which links to the movie on DVD (a related work), the book read by Jim Dale (different expression), and the Spanish translation (different expression). There’s also a link to another Harry Potter book, which is a mistake but easily corrected. This is now a semi-FRBRized catalogue! LibraryThing also supplies links to related books and tags, which you’ll want to look at.
- They only have one item of The Hero with a Thousand Faces so there’s nothing FRBRy there.
- They have four items that are exemplars of a particular manifestation of Pride and Prejudice, and it links to an audiobook and what seem to be literary criticism, but not the movie. As with Harry Potter, searching for “pride and prejudice” shows movie results before the books.
Those are the first three books I tried, and the FRBRization isn’t perfect, but I’m not complaining. Congratulations to the Danbury Library and LibraryThing on getting this implemented! There’s a lot more going on than just the FRBRization, of course, but I’ll leave that to others to discuss, and will just say that it’s very nice work that all other libraries will want to ponder.