Yesterday a pop-up IndieWeb meet-up (event page) took place on Personal Libraries / distributed libraries.
It was a nice group of people, and I was able to put some faces to names of people I’ve had in my feedreader for a good while. I had to miss the start, which was family dinner / putting our 5yo to bed time in our timezone, but was able to join three sessions afterwards. The conversations were interesting and gently paced. Thank you to Chris Aldrich for organising, and to all participants for their contributions to worthwile conversations.
The videos and notes are / will be linked to on the event page (see link in first sentence).
The sessions were:
- Ad hoc book discussion clubs and sessions (how to use personal libraries to facilitate ad-hoc discussion of a book with other current active readers of the same book?) Moderated by Maggie Appleton
- Decentralised bookshelves (What conventions do we need to reach a useful level of interoperability between the different ways people and platforms make such data available) Moderated by Manton Reece
- Book Identifiers (There are multiple identifiers in use for books, ISBN, OLID, ASIN, WorldCat etc. How can we interact with them, how are we supposed to, how is it useful?) Moderated by Tom MacWright.
While these were three distinct sessions, to me it felt like basically the same ongoing conversation, so my impressions aren’t tied to specific sessions as such.
Elements that stood out for me, or that I realised listening to the other participants:
- OpenLibrary is a good neutral way to link to a book (I avoid Amazon as well as Amazon’s GoodReads links, and publisher’s or author’s links aren’t always available), and they have an API. Missing books can be added, as OpenLibrary is a wiki. They also make a useful difference between the work (the book written) and the editions (the book version you’ve read) that they list for the work. I may want to check out their API and see if I can use that for my internal book notes and/or public book postings.
- Calibre, an app to manage e-book collections I use for my non-Kindle books, has an API as well. It makes me wonder the same about Delicious Library, of which I have a 2012 database somewhere, from the 500 or so physical books we did away with that year.
- Discovery to me requires both information about the book and about the readers, so I can navigate triangles, the key element in social media. To evaluate recommendations they require information about the person making the recommendation more than about the book being recommended.
- I’m not interested in pretend-social information around books that really are masked statistics. They may seem to provide what I seek in the previous point, but actually provide a meaningless regression to the mean. Things like ‘others who bought this book also bought’ don’t increase the space of discovery but will eventually always limit the space of discovery to the fat head of the long tail. The stuff far down the long tail sees too little interaction for such ‘also bought’ algorithms to aggregate.
- Whatever you want to do with book information, you need to first publish data about your reading in each case. So that is the focus. I’ve been collecting a list of some URLs where people share book lists they’ve read. They are all different it seems to me, but at least the data is out there to try and consume in a personally meaningful way.
- Whatever is consuming book related data or posts, needs to take on the burden of figuring out what identifiers are used, or what other meaning can be gleaned from it. A to me key remark made by Jacky Alciné. The flip side for me is, I only need to concern myself first with publishing information that is meaningful and useful to myself.
- It is possible to help others though by providing multiple formats. Specifically now that I have automated generating OPML from my booknotes for my booklists. Creating the same lists in CSV, in RSS, or JSON for instance is easy enough to do now. This I added to my list of small side projects.
- Book lists are basically just spreadsheets Drini Cami of the Open Library / Internet Archive remarked. This ties into the above. I also realised it’s true for pulling together the data about books I bought and read from the various platforms I use. So this morning I pulled the information about the 800 or so books I bought with Amazon over the past 15 years into a spreadsheet. This is a first step to backfilling my book notes and reading lists, as well as my anti-library, using a script.
- I’m not very interested in algorithms across the reading patterns of the general population of readers. This is another statistic basically, not a socially meaningful thing. I would be very interested in running algorithms or analysis across the information about other people reading, who are within my scope. E.g. the bloggers I follow in my feed reader, or the bloggers they follow. An algorithm that serves me, not describes or commodifies me, an algorithm as personal assistant. That way my own preferences can be its default.
- We talked about ad-hoc book clubs, both where a book is the key point, as well as where the socialising is more important. I’m on Bookwyrm.social which aims to be a federated GoodReads, something that is in itself not appealing to me as just a means of replicating the same data as on my site. But I have seen instance form around an established group or niche themes. That is a more appealing usage. Only afterwards I thought of how this ties into the Micro.blog Readers Republic we recently formed. A next meeting is in 2 weeks, I’ll think about how to feed some of these discussion back to that group.
- Amazon with their ASIN numbers is messing up the discovery value of ISBN numbers, by deliberately removing the relation between the two. That frustrates interoperability with other platforms and resources, which is their point I’m sure.
That’s a good list of take-aways from a few hours of conversation!
Thanks for the writeup!
(Small correction – I wasn’t able to attend so wasn’t leading a session!)
I’m pretty aligned with you here and love seeing this move forward
Great seeing this “web of books” start to emerge. Hoping to keep working on library.json later this year
@ton nice!Recently I’ve been looking at how we can best spread the word on what books we hold in the small @EICAS museum library. Basically it seems OCLC’s https://worldcat.org is the only real game in town (there’s also https://library.link but that seems like a bit of a ghost town), but the costs are a barrier.A more open alternative, perhaps as accompaniment to the indeed-great https://openlibrary.org/ would fill a void I think.Do you know of other interesting initiatives?
WorldCat.org: The World’s Largest Library Catalog
What tool did you use to scrape your Amazon book purchases.? I was able to scrape my audible purchases but did not find an easy way for Amazon.
The e-books I copy pasted from the manage content tab in my Amazon account (their site shows 200 at a time, so it was 4 copy pastes). My physical book purchases were spread out over Amazon US and Amazon Germany, but about 50 in total in mayb 15 purchases, so I did those by hand too. Amazon doesn’t provide an export feature that makes sense, other than connecting your purchases to a GoodReads account and exporting a CSV there. I wanted to avoid doing that.
thanks! Thanks too for the correction, wil change it!
@raboof worldcat was also mentioned yday in the session. Also Library of Congress LCCN was mentioned, but that’s US specific obviously.But I don’t know of others.
This was a pretty regular week, which was good to have and be able to get a few things done. I did feel tired a lot though. From next week most pandemic measures will be abolished, and we’ll see how that changes the equilibrium of our rhythms again.
This week I:
had a follow-up meeting with my business partners about a few points we didn’t get to in last weeks conversation.
did some more monthly invoicing
had the weekly client meetings
had a session with two European Commission directorates about digital twins, comparing each other’s work and plans in these areas. Also prepared the meeting notes and circulated those later in the week, as well as having a follow-up conversation.
welcomed a new colleague in a client team
spent a day at a client’s office
caught up with the director of the NGO I chair and planned a meeting for next week.
did a session with the CIO office of a ministry about the coming EU data legislation
joined a working session of national INSPIRE representatives, from France, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands, to discuss the EU data legislation’s impact and the DEP calls to prepare some of the sectoral data spaces envisioned.
had an evening meet-up of the Dutch Creative Commons association to go through the new government agreement w.r.t. aspects of openness, such as open culture, open education, and open science.
decided to join a trip to Montenegro in June with my old fraternity
turned the coming new legal instruments for data sharing in to a list of questions to ask of a number of experimental projects in the Netherlands to explore what current data sharing or usage issues they encounter, and whether the newly created instruments would be useful for them. Not just to make things easier per se, but also to ensure responsible data governance and usage
extended my micropub client with some more options, being able to choose more sites to post to, and to post pages not just blogposts.
did some gardening, pruning some shrubs
participated in the IndieWeb pop-up session about personal libraries.
Thanks for the write up! I’m interested in this topic and sad I missed the session. I keep a catalogue of everything I’ve read on my site, but am interested in connecting it to a larger ecosystem. cagrimmett.com/reading/
This Article was mentioned on cagrimmett.com
Such a strange week. It started normally enough, but Thursday our 5yo woke up ill, and Russia started a war by invading Ukraine. The second half of the week therefore felt very much out of tilt.
This week I
converted my Amazon book purchases into a CSV file, as follow up to the personal libraries session last week.
participated in a session on the reference architecture of the Dutch national digital twin for the built environment. The session was the kick-off for the public consultation that runs until April.
had the weekly client meetings, one of which was in person again
worked on turning the EU Digital Rights and Principles communication into Dutch language notes to share with the network of Dutch data holders.
started reading the EU Data Act, published this week. This is the final piece of the framework that formulates the European geopolitical proposition w.r.t. digitisation and data, which will determine the context of most of my work for the next 10-15 years.
had a conversation with Y’s teacher about her progress in school
decided to move our company’s rocket.chat instance to a Dutch hoster on a managed VPS, and signed the proposal for it. To be done in the coming few weeks.
met payroll, and paid the preliminary 2022 company taxes and personal income taxes.
had a conversation with a company in our network about their current activities and where we might work together.
had a conversation with someone who might be interested in applying to work in our company
took care of Y as she was ill, resulting in two sleepless nights. Negatively impacted my concentration and alertness.
did some pruning in the garden, as the weather during the weekend was very nice after weeks of storm and rain.
Bookmarked Interoperable Personal Libraries and Ad Hoc Reading Groups by Maggie Appleton
I somehow missed Maggie Appleton’s blogpost (bookmarked above) about the IndieWeb pop-up session on personal libraries of a few weeks ago. During the session I found her suggestion for ad-hoc reading clubs very interesting, as an application of having book lists on your site. I first and foremost think about discovery in the context of publishing book lists: if I enjoy your blog, or know you and you share book lists those may contain good suggestions to read. Discovery is also why in my ‘data format‘ for such lists I allow for sharing the URLs of lists of others, as well as share the URL of where I found the recommendation for a specific book. What Maggie Appleton suggests is something else and interesting: what if you could see when several others in your network are also currently reading the same book you are reading, allowing an ad-hoc book reading club for that book. It would require a way to compare lists you follow. My sharing of lists I follow is a useful start for it I think, but you’d add a match detection layer on top of it. Whether that matching needs to take place in my site, I don’t know. To me it feels like a personal tool perhaps, alerting me to other readers, and allowing me to privately think about whether I’d want to form an ad-hoc book club with them at that time.