FRBRmore

The Libraries of The Claremont Colleges, CA USA
Home: http://libraries.claremont.edu/
Blog: http://liblog.libraries.claremont.edu/
Catalogue: http://blais.claremont.edu/

When The Libraries of The Claremont Colleges went live with LibraryThing for Libraries in September 2007, it was the largest collection using LTfL. It is an example of both an academic library and a library consortium using LTfL.

In a previous post, I talked about Danbury Public Library using tags from LibraryThing to enhance reader’s advisory and browsing. In the context of an academic library. The feature I’d like to highlight at this library is the Other editions list.

When you look at the record for a book in the Claremont Colleges catalogue, you see a list of links titled “Other editions and translations (LibraryThing suggested).” This is a list of all the other books in the library that LibraryThing has identified as being the same ‘work’ as the book you are looking at.

LibraryThing uses the concept of a work to gather information about different editions of the same work together. Much of the information in LibraryThing for example, tags and reviews, can apply to all editions of a work. The base unit of a book in LibraryThing is the copy of a book that someone has added to their library. That copy is an example of an edition. The edition is one of many editions that represent a work. LibraryThing users have the ability to identify which work they think an edition belongs to – in effect, partially FRBRising the LibraryThing catalogue.

This information about different editions to a work are very useful in an academic catalogue. For example, take a look at Claremont Colleges catalogue record for Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf:

By using the LibraryThing edition information, the record can provide links to all the other identified editions of Beowulf the library holds. If a user does not want the translation by Heaney, they can immediately tell that there are three other translations available. One click opens the catalogue record for the selected translation.

Good Stuff

• Lets the sure see all available editions of a work, not just the one they selected from the catalogue search results.
• Gives the user the ability to make an informed choice about the edition they use.
• While not shown in the Heany example, this feature also can tie together versions in different languages and in different media, e.g. large print and audio books.

Could be Better Stuff

• This catalogue has the biggest lag, it took up to twenty second for the LibraryThing data to show up, and there are no place holders to indicate that there is more data to come.
• In an interview with ARCLog, three librarians involved in the LTfL implementation at Claremont Colleges described some wish list improvements they’d lie to see including:
  • Because there is no live link, when new books is added to Claremont’s catalogue, someone has to manually send the new ISBNs to LT to have their data updated.
  • LibraryThing depends on ISBN numbers to determine what books a library has. If a book has no ISBN, it isn’t included in the LibraryThing data.

In future blog posts, I’ll talk about the list of Similar books.