LibraryThing Release Notes

We've given Add Books — one of LibraryThing's oldest and most-used pages — a top-to-bottom redesign. It's live now at Add Books tab on LT.

If you're new to LibraryThing, adding your first books is now slightly more visually organized and you see the results of your actions more directly. And there are now better visuals to tell inexperienced users what to do (Add Book).

For long-time members, there's a lot here too:

Search once, add many.

The page is now split into two tabs — Search Results and Recently Added. Adding a book no longer loses your search: add one, then jump straight back to your results and keep going. Entering a set of related search results is now possible.

Click to add anywhere.

You don't necessarily have to click on the "Add Book" button to add a book from the search results. Click anywhere on a search result to add it, and watch the cover fly over to your Recently Added tab.

Still the same ole features you are used to

We tried not to change what was working well, so quick edit is still available on every book. And you can jump straight to the full detailed book edit page.

This new version should be much more accessible for all users, but if you have accessibility issues caused by the new version let us know and we will try to correct them.

The new version also is more compact and useable on mobile devices and (should be) easier to use.

This is the first major redesign of the Add Books feature in years and it's the first thing new member see when they try to add content to LibraryThing. We hope you like the nuanced changes.

Obviously, if there are problems let us know and we'll address them.

As an aside: This new version also brings our last normal LT page into the LT2 design overhaul. This is a momentous occasion for us and is the result of years of work. We still have one last page: Your Library. But that one is a unique beast and won't hold up any other design-related work that was waiting on LT2 to be finished (light/dark mode anybody?)

I've given the Helpers Log (https://www.librarything.com/log_helpers.php) a big upgrade. It is now essentially complete—a one-stop page for everything members are doing to help the site—which it wasn't quite before. This will allow members to examine what other members are doing more easily.

You can see some screenshots below.

In brief, the improvements are:

• 1. It is much faster, so it's not an annoying pain to use!
• 1. It's now divided into sections, like "Work" and "Author," so you can drill down to a subset of helpers easier.
• 1. It includes everything that I would classify as "Helpers," except the complete Common Knowledge system, which is linked on the right of the page.
• 1. New sections include Series, Awards, Pictures, Flags, Spam, Tags, Local, and Groups. (Pictures is split into author and venue; Flags covers cover flags and the three picture-flag types; Tags now includes tag combinations, tag translations, and canonical tags.)
• 1. You can now search for helper actions by a given member, (e.g., GwynethM). When by member, you can go back up to a month.

Let me know what changes you want to see. I'm thinking I should add pagination, so you can go back farther in time without making the page length insane.

We have been making changes in order to clean up some of the issues with work summaries/descriptions.

1. We have added code to find and remove the (genre name)/HTML: prefixes on some descriptions

• Order of the Phoenix

  • Previously: Young Adult Fiction. HTML:'You are sharing the Dark Lord's thoughts and emotions…

• Mr. Lemoncello's Fantabulous Finale

  • Previously: Juvenile Fiction. Juvenile Literature. Mystery. HTML:Do you have what it takes to be the new owner…

• Big Jim Begins

  • Previously: Comic and Graphic Books. Juvenile Fiction. Humor (Fiction.) HTML:In DOG MAN: BIG JIM BEGINS…

2. We have also added code to fix encoding issues in some summaries, which resulted in many <?> type icons, or foreign characters displaying as odd combinations of characters. Summaries should now be much cleaner and easier to read.

• The Poisoned King

  • Previously: #1 New York Times bestseller Impossible Creatures, hailed as �an instant classic� (Katherine Applegate

• Statistik - viden fra data

  • Previously: discipliner s�vel som

• Gravglänta

  • Previously: f©œrsvinner ©Ætta©Æriga

(thanks to @bnielsen for finding a bunch of examples of badly encoded non-English characters)

If you see any summaries that are still displayed incorrectly, or examples of summaries that have prefixes or encoding problems, please post them here.

Check out https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/usstates

It shows your authors by their natal state. So you can see which states predominate (it's going to be New York), and which you are missing. (I don't have any books from authors in Nevada, Wyoming, South Dakota or Alaska—at least until more authors get birthplaces.)

Here I regret that we don't have a more general "associated with that state" field. Maybe it should look at the first line of "Places of Residence" failing over to "Place of Birth"? Even that would not fill it. For example, Edgar Allen Poe was born in Massachusetts, and his "Places of Residence" start with Boston. Maybe we could start with state where he is buried—Maryland?

How about burial, failing to birth, failing to residence? And we add a field for "most associated with"—or we tell people to put the most-associated residence first, rather than (as now) organizing it chronologically.

Post your map here, especially if it's interesting. I wonder if anyone has a map that ISN'T New York dominated.

or we tell people to put the most-associated residence first, rather than (as now) organizing it chronologically.

I don't think there is any real pattern to place of residence, but if chronological it's probably from how they're listed in biographies...

This is pretty neat graph! I was amused by a "not set" for my currently reading collection who is Canadian - but then I saw we don't have her birthplace, only that she lives in Toronto now, so it truly is not set. :)

eta: hello, Ohio!

As you know, Common Knowledge is a general system for adding data to LibraryThing. It's a "fielded wiki"—each bit of data is a mini wiki, tracked separately and with a history of updates.

For years now we've had three work-level pages, for Characters (Marilyn Monroe), Events (Salem witch trials), and Places (Isle of Man).

Today, we're introducing twelve new pages, for authors. You can find a survey of all the pages here: https://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/

The categories are:

• Occupations (spy, suffragist, podcaster, sex worker)
• Organizations (Society of Jesus, Freemasons, Phi Beta Kappa)
• Nationalities (New Zealand, Finland, Roman Empire)
• Education (Hampshire College, Sorbonne, Harvard University, Concord Academy)
• Author Awards (OBE, MacArthur Fellowship, Nobel Prize)
• Birth Places (Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, Riga, Latvia)
• Places of Residence (Maine, USA)
• Places of Death (Nashville, Tennessee, USA)
• Burial Locations (Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Paris, France, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, USA)
• Cause of Death (car crash, tuberculosis)
• Connections (Queen Victoria, Fleming, Ian)
• Gender (female, non-binary)

All the new pages have a "Your authors" button, so you can see which of YOUR authors are from Hungary, went to Oxford, etc.

We've also introduced a new Common Knowledge homepage and an All Fields page with links and data, including how many edits you've made to each field.

Other changes include:

• All CK pages are faster, with the larger ones now cached, with the cache date listed on the page.
• I've added a page for work blurbers —those quotes you see on a book, telling you Stephen King thought the book "excellent!" or whatever. (In fact, Stephen King is king.)

Now that the data is much-better exposed, there's a lot to clean up, especially in Nationalities, and a lot to add. I went ahead and did some cleanup on Hampshire College and Concord Academy.

Please note that, as of now, all of these new pages use only English-language Common Knowledge data. Mixing other languages in made the pages confusing. What we really need is a comprehensive system of aliasing and translations so that, for example, an author's nationality is not listed as United States on the English translation and États-Unis in the French. There should be one answer, and it should be translated at need. All these new translated pages make the situation clear and the need pressing.

By popular request, LibraryThing can now provide "suggested tags" for works. The option is available wherever you can change a book's tags. You can show or hide the section, as you desire.

The section is divided into two sub-sections: "Your tags" combines a selection of your recently-used and commonly-used tags. "Suggested" suggests tags from other members and other algorithmic suggestions. Not every work has suggested tags, but most do.

As noted, this has been a popular request, but one I've always resisted. It's been my feeling that the best tags emerge naturally from members' interests and opinions. But we felt it was important to have an easier way to tag, especially on our upcoming mobile app, and we have come to think this will strengthen tagging on the site overall.

In the near future, I'm going to see if I can't tilt the algorithm more toward the tags you use—so it's better at suggesting your tags for new books.

Let me know what you think.

[User feedback and discussion omitted for brevity]

Okay, I've

1. Flipped the two sections
2. Renamed "Your tags" to "Your recent and often-used"
3. Upped the "Suggested" section to 16 tags and improved the algorithm somewhat.

We've rolled out a new book shelf component across several pages on LibraryThing — starting with tagmash and a few other discovery pages. It's a ground-up rewrite of the shelf code that's been running (mostly unchanged) for over a decade, and we think it's a meaningful improvement.

The old shelves calculated how many books to fit by doing math against a hardcoded pixel budget at render time. This worked reasonably well on the screen sizes of 2010, but on phones, wide monitors, or anything in between, it often got the math wrong — covers would get cut off on the right side, or you'd get awkward gaps where another book almost fit. The new shelves use CSS grid and let the browser handle layout, so books always fill the available space correctly at any width.

Here's what's new or improved:

• Responsive layout — the grid reflows correctly on phones, tablets, wide monitors, and everything in between. No more cut-off covers on the right edge.

• Drag to resize —
  NEW! You can now control how many rows you see ANY place we use these new shelf views.
  Just grab the handle at the bottom-right corner and drag to show more (or fewer) rows.
  Your preference is saved so it sticks across visits. On home page modules,
  dragging saves directly to that module's settings — the same as if you'd gone into the
  module preferences and changed the row count there.

• Smart Pagination — prev/next controls let you page through long result sets even if you change the size of the view and the number of items on screen changes.

• Filter bar — many pages like tagmash now have a cleaner filter bar with Publication date and Media type dropdowns, replacing the old pillbox UI that didn't adapt well on small screens.

• "Have it" checkmarks — the green checkmarks showing which books are in your library are still there, now with slightly cleaner rendering.

If you spot anything odd let us know here.

(The work for this feature was done by @conceptDawg)

I've made several chnges to bring the Place, Character and Event pages up to snuff with the other pages I've recently revamped (tags, tagmashes, genres, LCC and MDS).

Improvements include:

• Pages now include the now-standard bar, allowing you to see results as covers, titles or—new—the previous "table" format.
• The bar includes filtering by media, publication year and whether the books are in Your books
• Related tags section
• Related lists section

Examples:

Places — London, England, UK
Places — Paris, France
Places — Hell
— Character — Andy Warhol
Character — Santa Claus
— Character — Satan
Events — World War II
Events — Boston Massacre

Some ideas for improvements:

1. Tagmash has a special search box on it, so you can make new tagmashes. But we need an easy way to search for a place, character or event on place, character and event pages. As it is, you'd have to search and then switch facet on the left of the results. I think that's suboptimal.
2. Places need to get correlated to real places, so you could see a map of significant places around you.

Following on my improvements to tags, tagmashes, genre, LCC and MDS pages (see https://www.librarything.com/topic/383744), I've pushed some major changes to tag pages:

• Tag pages now have a "your books" filter, so you can see the tag filtered down to your books
• If you yourself have used the tag on a work, it shows on the cover with an orange tag icon
• Tag pages now have sections for "Related Series" and "Related Lists."
• Tag pages now have a "scoreboard" on top, with crucial stats, and the aliases and translations have moved down the page.

Examples:

Science Fiction
Dragons
Cozy mystery
Historical Fiction
Alexander the Great + Fiction
Middle Grade + Magic
Maine + horror

Tagmash pages have also acquired Related Series and Related Lists.

I've made a number of improvements to the tagmash, tag, genre and LCC pages.

Update:

And MDS.

1.

All pages now follow the shelf-or-titles pattern.

This means that tagmashes, which were formerly just a text list, now look like tag pages. You can look at the covers, or you switch to titles. The look and feel of these shelves has been improved, with slightly larger covers, matching other shelves elsewhere, and more shelves. The shelf/title switcher has been moved to the top, alongside the filters (see below).

Examples:

(tag: Paranormal romance)
(tagmash: Greek + historiography)
(genre: Horror)
(LCC: PS8001-8599, Canadian Literature)
See
(MDS 560 Fossils)

2.

Tagmashes are faster.

I've switched to the tagmash algorithm we use behind the scenes on Talpa. It should be faster, often dramatically so.(1)

Examples:

Go do your own!

3.

All four have much better filtering options.

All four have filters for Publication (i.e., publication date). And all four also allow filtering by media—allowing members to see only titles that have an audiobook or ebook. This existed on some pages, but was based on what we knew of Kindle and Audio. The new filter is based on whether we've seen an ebook or audiobook for the title. While exactitude about the supplier would be ideal, the data is much richer if it's just "is there an audiobook?" Most ebooks and audiobooks are available on most platforms, and if they aren't, LibraryThing can't keep up with other companies' stock and offers.

If you're filtering something large, like all books under the LCC class "E," the system can be slow. I hope it's still useful.

Tags also have a sort option: "Count," "Weighted" and "Popular." This existed before in a different way. It should be clearer now.

1. The new system is based on bitwise operations. Each large tag has a precomputed bitset—one bit per work we know about (>35M), set to 1 if the work has that tag. To combine tags (e.g., YA and Fantasy), we take the two bitsets and perform a bitwise AND to get the intersection. Once we have that subset, we query for counts and other details. It may sound heavy, but it’s much faster, especially when the sets intersect minimally, because we don't need to get the counts on works that don't intersect.

Great! Is there a particular reason why MDS pages were not included? Also, why not include various sorts on all? Sounds useful

I'll look into adding MDS and some others--subjects, BISAC, CK pages. The page has a very different structure, but there's still a shelf.

As for sorts, it's a matter of efficiency. Tags have two natural ways to sort, the others do not. But I'm open to suggestions.

Cool. While we're on tags and mashings: for awards, the tags section at the bottom of each awards page has links for each tag that just go to a global tag search. Wouldn't it be more useful to have them to filter to works with a given tag that are associated with the particular award (at least as an option)?

Neat!

Just curious. As of a couple of years, the Related Tags tag clouds at the bottom of pages never use the tag translations. Is there a reason for that?

My tally so far:

Translated
Tag
Work pages
MDS
Author
Lists

Not Translated
Genres
Awards
LCC
Series
Tag cloud

Okay, I might have exaggerated. Or rather, I went by my impression. But will this change?

Coulgd we have a setting to automatically get titles instead of having to switch it every time?

I changed it to titles when i tried it earlier and it seems to have remembered it.

Is it not sticking for you? It's a separate "stick" on every type, but it should stick.

All of these are now translated.

How's that? (Don't thank me. Thank Claude Code on this one.)

Great! Is there a particular reason why MDS pages were not included?

MDS has been added to the list.

See

I have flipped the left and the right, so the cover/titles selector and any sort selectors are on the left. The filter options are on the right. It seems to me the former are going to be used more and are more central, so they should be on the left. People have a bad habit of not seeing things that are on the right.

Thank you 😍

I've made a number of cover improvements.

In response to @LeslieWx 's request (https://www.librarything.com/topic/383591), I've added the ability for members to upload covers to works they do not own or have in their books.

We let add author photos, venue photos and many work details. I expect some members will want to help out, adding covers for books they don't own.

To see this in action, just go to a work not in your library, and go to the "Cover" sub-page. You will see a message like this:

You don't have this book in your library, but you can still contribute a cover image for this work. Your cover will be available for other members to use. Work-level covers do not replace other covers as the work's main image.

As hinted at, work-level covers do not normally replace member covers. So if a work has no cover at all, it can become the work cover. But it's basically the last resort. Put another way, LibraryThing picks the work-level cover based on a "score," involving factors like how many members use it, and the quality. Member-uploaded work covers have a very low base score.

In the discussion, members raised the prospect of spam, so I've done a number of things to reduce the concern:

1. There is now a "Recent Work Covers" gallery (https://www.librarything.com/gallery/recent/workcovers), so members can keep an eye on work covers as they do on new author and venue images.

2. I've improved the "Cover Flags" page (https://www.librarything.com/helpers_covers.php). It now divides covers by their type—Member-Uploaded, Work cover, Amazon ISBN, Amazon ASIN and All sources. The page is better in various smaller ways.

3. On work cover pages, flagged covers are now marked. See this book for a book with flags on two covers https://www.librarything.com/work/44975/covers

4. Flagged covers are less likely to be chosen as the work's cover, even if they haven't hit the threshold necessary to close the cover flagging.

Other updates:

1. I rebuilt some data, which will cause several hundred thousand books with ASINs, but no ISBNs, to get covers now, without clicking to recalculate the cover.

2. The new covers show up in your home-page "Recent Member-Uploaded Covers for Your Books" module.

Nice!

There's a minor bug on https://www.librarything.com/helpers_covers.php on my end. When clicking a vote in the pop-up (reached by expanding a cover with "View cover details"), the vote tally in the pop-up doesn't change. When closing the pop-up the newly added vote is correctly reflected in the list on the page. I'd expect the vote tally in the pop-up to also dynamically update.