LibraryThing: State of the Thing - January

LibraryThing: State of the Thing Dear {NAME}, Welcome to the January State of the Thing! This State of the Thing is short and written by Tim out of necessity. The last few weeks saw a number of people on the LibraryThing team stricken by COVID. They are all recovering or fully recovered now. We hope you too are safe and healthy! If you'd rather receive a plain-text version, [edit your email preferences](. You can also read it [online](. You can like LibraryThing on [Facebook]( and follow [@LibraryThing]( on Twitter for up-to-the-minute site news and updates. Features Tag Pages Revamped. Tag pages have been revamped for "LT2"—made more attractive, mobile and accessible. See the tag pages for [urban fantasy](fantasy), [cozy mystery](mystery), [evolutionary psychology](psychology), [first contact](contact), [Underground Railroad](Railroad), [Lord of the Rings](of+the+Rings). On This Day Redesigned. Chris H. (@conceptdawg) gave "On This Day" an elegant facelift. You can [see it here](. We're [talking about it on Talk](. Faster Catalog Search. Pedro and Chris C. switched our catalog search system over to new servers, cutting the average search time in half. Coming Soon: Early Reviewers Revamp! On February 7 we'll be releasing a new batch of Early Reviewer books and a new interface, system and some new rules. We've been promoting it heavily to publishers and authors, big and small, and expect February to be a huge batch. Here's a sneak peak of the new design! Group Read: Maus by Art Spiegelman We've started a group read of [Maus by Art Spiegelman](. You can find the starter topic here at [Group Read: Maus by Art Spiegelman](. If you don't know it, Maus is an absolute classic, and the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences during the Holocaust. While sparing little of the horrors of the Holocaust, Spiegelman depicts Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, etc. As you may have heard, a Tennessee school board recently voted 10-0 to remove the book from their eighth grade curriculum, citing several "cuss words," and one instance of (mouse) nudity. In other statement the board cited it unsparing descriptions of violence and trauma, recommending that teachers find another book on the Holocaust without these alleged defects. As you may imagine, this decision has drawn extensive criticism from across the book, school and library world. I (Tim) haven't read Maus in 30 years, but all the discussion got me interested in reading it again. Apparently I'm not the only one, with bookstores having trouble keeping it in stock. Even so, there are a lot of copies out there—15,000 among LibraryThing members alone. Other staff were interested, so I'm organizing a group read. Check out [Group Read: Maus by Art Spiegelman](. Free Books! Our December batch of Early Reviewers has 1,912 copies of 56 books. The deadline to request a book is Monday, January 31st at 6PM EST. Did you win a book recently? When you receive your book, make sure you head over to your [Books You've Won]( page to mark it received. After you've read your book, add your review to LibraryThing. First, add the book to your LibraryThing catalog. Then click the pencil-shaped "edit" icon next to the book, or click "edit book" from the work page. Type your review into the Review box, and click "submit" to save it. Reviewing your books gives you a greater chance of winning books in the future, while neglecting to review lowers your odds. For more information, vist the [Early Reviewers Help Page](. Hot on LibraryThing Here are some titles that were been particularly hot on LibraryThing in the last month: - [The Magnolia Palace]( by [Fiona Davis]( - [To Paradise]( by [Hanya Yanagihara]( - [Reckless Girls]( by [Rachel Hawkins]( - [The Maid]( by [Nita Prose]( - [Where the Drowned Girls Go]( by [Seanan McGuire]( - [How High We Go in the Dark]( by [Sequoia Nagamatsu]( - [A Flicker in the Dark]( by [Stacy Willingham]( - [Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience]( by [Brene Brown]( - [A History of Wild Places]( by [Shea Ernshaw]( - [Outside, Inside]( by [LeUyen Pham]( - [Small Things Like These]( by [Claire Keegan]( - [Will]( by [Will Smith]( - [The Cat Who Saved Books]( by [Sosuke Natsukawa]( - [Wish You Were Here]( by [Jodi Picoult]( - [Call Us What We Carry: Poems]( by [Amanda Gorman]( - [Autopsy]( by [Patricia Cornwell]( - [A Marvellous Light]( by [Freya Marske]( - [Fear No Evil]( by [James Patterson]( - [These Precious Days: Essays]( by [Ann Patchett]( - [The Island of Missing Trees]( by [Elif Shafak]( Hot in Libraries LibraryThing and ProQuest put together a blog post on the [2021 Top Titles across public libraries]( in the US, Australia, Canada and the UK. We also made a "bar chart race" of the most popular books. Described as "absolutely mesmerizing" you may find you lose an hour watching it. There are also more sedate representations: This data was collected by Syndetics Unbound, a LibraryThing/ProQuest project to enrich the library catalog. The search data is fully anonymized the day it is collected. For more information about Syndetics Unbound, please visit [Syndetics.com](. Read the [Syndetics Unbound blog post here](. TinyCat [TinyCat]( is the online catalog for small libraries, created by LibraryThing. It turns your existing LibraryThing account into a simple, professional, web-based catalog. Library of the Month. Every month, one special TinyCat library is selected as the Library of the Month. For January, we are highlighting the [Concentrating Solar Power Digital Library Archive](. Kristi interviewed Technical Librarian Shannon O’Grady from Sandia National Laboratories on the [LibraryThing Blog]( this month. Q. Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”? The Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) Digital Library Archive is a technical reference database of historical CSP documents accessible to domestic and global partners with the purpose of promoting collaboration and information sharing. It is the only public collection in the world that chronicles the history and growth of the CSP industry through recently digitized documents, beginning with its inception at Sandia National Laboratories in the 1970’s. Until recently, this history was inaccessible to global collaborators. Hardcopy documents were difficult to share and no central repository existed to catalogue and access digital copies. Since the documents had no way to be discovered, knowledge of their existence and substance was limited to those who were aware of these collections, minimizing the opportunity for external collaborators to benefit from their technical contents. Consequently, researchers stood to inadvertently replicate studies instead of building on them. The Archive contains: - coverage of research topics such as CSP technologies - modeling of CSP Plant - CSP engineered products - heliostat designs - heliostat operational systems, and much more. You can find the full interview on the [LibraryThing Blog](. TinyCat Webinars. You’re invited to TinyCat’s free, live webinars [on Wednesdays at 1pm Eastern](, where you can see everything TinyCat has to offer. This is your chance to ask LibraryThing host Kristi any questions you have about getting started with TinyCat. Join the next webinar [on Zoom]( at 1pm on Wednesday. If Wednesdays at 1pm don't work for you, let us know at tinycat@librarything.com we’ll be happy to schedule a special session with you. That's all for the Thing this month! Happy reading, Tim This message was sent to {NAME}. Click to [edit your email preferences or unsubscribe from future emails](.