Much of the free/open API stuff is converging rapidly into wikidata. My
library has just gone live with LCCN / wikidata integration, for example.

The network effect means that wikidata is just so much better at describing
things. Wikidata subsumes LibraryThing via four IDs (see
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q742640 ).

There are 100% things that aren't a good fit with the wikipedia model and I
believe that it would be best for LibraryThing to focus on those., while
leaning on wikidata for more complex queries.

Personal reviews and reading history. The ubiquitous "What to read once
you've read all of <currently fashionable author>" lists that libraries
have been generating for decades and which are so important for getting
young readers hooked on recreational reading. Auto-completion for input
boxes (how people try and spell names, as opposed to the correct spelling
of names). Book discussion groups. Maybe as a place for coordination of
crowd-sourced book/library related work on wikidata.

[Deborah, great app. You should probably use the title / description in the
native language where available rather than Q number, but I know language
stuff is a pain. ]

cheers
stuart
--
...let us be heard from red core to black sky


On Thu, 29 Aug 2024 at 11:12, Fitchett, Deborah <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Kia ora Tim,
>
> There's a challenge that floats around to read a book from every country
> in the world. The problem is to try and find a list of books by, say,
> Azerbaijani authors - if you search a library catalogue for fiction --
> Azerbaijan you're going to come up with a lot of books by US authors who
> may never have even visited the country.
>
> I ended up using Wikidata to create a proof-of-concept at
> https://deborahfitchett.com/toys/aroundtheworld/ but you can see how
> limited the results are for some countries: they've got a great free and
> flexible query service (the flexibility means it'd be trivial to instead
> query for books by librarians, or books that are the first in a trilogy, or
> books published in a city that was hosting the Olympics that year, or...)
> but at the moment they don't have a lot of data about specific book titles.
>
> So... LibraryThing could have an API that lets people do some of this kind
> of query based on your Common Knowledge data.
>
> And/or... you could donate some of your data to Wikidata and help build up
> the linked open data there. You'd want to figure out what data should be
> 'free' and what data you want to keep as your value-add, but even just
> adding the core bibliographic data (eg the title, author/editor, date of
> first publication, and some identifier whether an ISBN or Worldcat ID or
> whatever to aid people with future matching) would be a massive
> contribution. You could then also pull back the Wikidata identifier into
> LibraryThing, and link between the records, and thereby benefit from any
> additional data the community adds on the Wikidata side; and it would
> offload some of the burden of scraping to the Wikidata servers. 😊 I've
> previously done a collaborative project uploading data on 65,000-odd theses
> to Wikidata so I've got some contacts that can point in the right direction
> if this is something you're interested in exploring.
>
> Ngā mihi,
>
> Deborah
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Tim
> Spalding
> Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2024 8:43 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [CODE4LIB] APIs and Mashups / LibraryThing
>
> [You don't often get email from [log in to unmask] Learn why this is
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>
>
> TL;DR: Is anyone still using library- and book-related APIs? If you could
> have an API to anything known to LibraryThing, what would you want?
>
> I'm revamping LibraryThing's APIs, and am interested in what the Code4Lib
> community is thinking about APIs and mashups today. Is anyone doing
> anything interesting, or is this an idea from the past?
>
> On the one hand, I remember the heady days of cool book APIs and library
> mashups. I contributed a chapter to Nicole Engard's book "Library Mashups."
> I want to be part of a supportive community of people doing cool things.
> Making new APIs for that is worth it to me.
>
> On the other, LibraryThing has had to shut down many of its free APIs
> because they saw almost no "good" use—just a lot of abusive scraping. I
> want to make cool APIs for library- and book-people doing interesting
> things with books. I don't want to help jerks with crappy or dangerous
> "free ebook" sites populate their data. Whatever we do, it has to have
> clear limits.
>
> So what's your feeling?
>
> Secondarily, if you had access to everything LibraryThing knows—twenty
> years of direct and implied user data about books, some 70m MARC records(1)
> and so forth—what would you want an API to? We sell some of what he have
> already, in services like Syndetics Unbound(2), and we aren't going to
> provide free APIs to a paid product, but there's a lot we can do for
> libraries without any commercial concerns.
>
> Best,
> Tim
> LibraryThing
>
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