LT

[mvrdrk]

Natter about LT.

I've given up waiting for LT to get Unicode right. I'll still use it for cataloging, but other than inventory, it'll be of no use until it gets a serious overhaul. Sigh. At least those with Japanese texts will find it useful, if incomplete.

On the other hand, I've found the very best reading there in the Ancient China group, http://www.librarything.com/groups/ancientchina LOL!

I picked up Yotsuba&! volume 4 in Japanese for the teens. The younger one was thrilled to be able to read the first three pages and understand them. When you see the first three pages, you'll understand how that's cheating ...

Comments

[mangaroo.livejournal.com]

It's pretty much hopeless for anything but inventory for the Japanese books, too. The covers from Amazon Japan are a time-saver, true, but if you clean up the messy Amazon data, you lose all social connections.

LT recently had Big Employment Drama (http://www.librarything.com/blog/2007/01/thanks-to-chris.php), so I'm not sure how long it will be before we see the promised author system overhaul (and I notice that no one has said Unicode would be fixed in the overhaul).

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

I try not to depend overmuch on those Amazon covers; I upload alternate user-provideds whenever I can.

I've found that (usually) you can at least hang on to a user-provided cover after you've severed your ties to everyone else -- provided that you add the cover first, before you do entry cleanups and suchlike.

Not sure what to make of that Chris thing. Nervous-making to see a database site discard its database admin w/o any replacement in view. Odd. Particularly the dude who'd fixed so much that was broken -- from my perspective, anyway. My impression is that he had a Wow! Huge! Massive! Impact on a relatively small population (foreign lang users), but the population at large didn't see/experience a viseral benefit along that line.

the promised author system overhaul

Gah. Lesson of the past: Grab catalog backups omg!

[sara-tanaquil.livejournal.com]

Eeek! Going to back up now. Thanks for the tip!

I just use LT for inventory at this point, too, and as a site to link to when making recommendations. For that it's handy.

Too bad to hear about the Employment Drama. Sometimes these start-ups work an awful lot like clubs in junior high.

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

After the last big crash, I wished so hard that I'd known how to back up. This time, um, I guess I don't really have an excuse if I get caught?

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

I back up every time I sit down and do any significant data entry. I wouldn't if I were just adding English books, but typing in all the Chinese manually is very slow so I don't want to lose that data.

I'm not sure I care all that much about the cataloging/inventory. If I'm putting things where they belong, I can always just go look on a shelf to see what I have and I collect very few series so it's easy to remember ...

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

LOL! I would have thought it was entering ISBNs that was the big time saver in handling Japanese books. For Japanese covers, I've taken to depending on jpqueen's web site. I'd find LT a lot more useful if they had a Chinese library data source so I could enter ISBNs, but their focus is clealy on European languages and I haven't gotten a library contact for them.

[mangaroo.livejournal.com]

I would have thought it was entering ISBNs that was the big time saver in handling Japanese books.

Ah, true. I suppose I overlook that feature because it's my minimal requirement for LT to be a useful inventory site. If LT weren't autopopulating bibliographic data based on ISBNs, I would build my own db.

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

I've given up waiting for LT to get Unicode right.

Mm, I used to nurse a few very faint hopes in that direction, but I've since moved on. It's just not going to happen, and this is life, etc. :P

Inventory is all I really want from that site. That is, yes, it _would_ be nice if those entries behaved like the other entries, but I don't view it as a necessity for essential function.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Since I was convinced until this morning that L was talking about some new programming code at work, I obviously lack the LT bug. What wonderful thing would happen if they got unicode right? Is this part of that 'Now I can find out who else is reading Zankoku na kami ga shihai suru!!' social function?

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's pretty much it. In theory, the site has two functions; 1) you can catalog your own books, and 2) see who else has those books.

So if 2 worked properly, you'd be able to see who all else has the same books/manga, in the original and/or in translation. You'd also be able to pull up author pages and see what else by that author is hanging around. Right now, you can't unless the language uses a roman character set. So for non-English and/or non-European works, it's just a personal cataloging site; for that purpose it works fine now.

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

Not even all European languages work correctly. Authors with accented characters in their names sometimes work correctly and sometimes don't. My Chinese manga keep getting mashed together with someone's Cyrillic titles and some elses French titles about architechture.

Do check out that link to the ancient Chinese group. They have all kinds of fun in there, classical chinese poetry puzzles and comments on the relationship between hanzi and kanji, etc. Worth browsing a bit to see if it interests you.

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

Following up on myself ...

I really should stop hanging out with random (Chinese) literature majors, it causes no end of knowledge envy.