Group the USA 'Add Books' Sources by state

This was suggested 5 years ago at http://www.librarything.com/topic/195618#5272893 , back when there were 'only' a few hundred USA sources in the All Sources list, but was not acted on at the time. As there are now 2,867 USA sources, it is an absurdly long list to try to look through in that tiny box. Please use subgroups by state to make the list less overwhelming, and make it easier to find libraries in a certain area of the US that you might not know by name (this is currently impossible since many source names don't have the state in parentheses). People who do already know the name of the library they want but not its state can always use their browser Find feature to jump to it.

(By the way, please also make that sources box use more of the available screen space. It is unnecessarily artificially constricted to a small fraction of my screen, especially-so on my portrait-orientation monitor.)

If LT is willing to finally do state subgroups, I am willing to help identify the groupings.

That would be awesome.

The workaround for now is the one I was able to implement in the titles of the sources themselves: for any given state, hitting Ctrl+F and searching for the state name, as well as for the two-letter abbreviation for that state, should find all sources in that state.

Not great, but better than lacking location info altogether (which was the status quo).

I probably have missed some. Will take a look when I can.

>3 davidgn: As I mentioned, some of them have the states in parentheses but quite a few don't (looks like several hundred). And on those that do, sometimes the state name is stated in full, other times it uses the state acronym.

PS: I saw that you have been a major contributor in getting sources added; kudos!

>4 Opteryx: Thanks. Meanwhile, I'll try to chip away at the remaining unannotated listings. But no plans at present to standardize on state names vs. acronyms. I added them the way I did to make them as unobtrusive as possible.

>5 davidgn: Well, unfortunately the inconsistency makes it not very useful for trying to Find by state. Most of them seem to use the acronyms, so why not all?

Come to think of it, could they all have the acronym placed at the beginning of the name, to force a close approximation of state subgroups without needing any programming work?

>6 Opteryx: Ugly solution, and I'd want to see consensus first. Seem to recall something like that was brought up before and got shot down. Plus there are the multi-state consortia -- some very widely scattered.

>7 davidgn: There don't seem to be very many multi-state entries at all; less than a dozen from what I could find. Could those just end up near the top of the list like how the Amazons and LoC are? Seems like Bowker Books In Print should also be up near the top as a nationwide source; I just stumbled onto it down in the 'B's today, hadn't known it was an option.

>3 davidgn:

or any given state, hitting Ctrl+F and searching for the state name, as well as for the two-letter abbreviation for that state, should find all sources in that state.

I'm sorry to say that I find that "workaround" pretty useless. Try using Ctrl+F to search for IL. 460 matches - every "council", "bookmobile", town with "ville" or "Hill" in its name. Want a source in Nebraska? "NE" gets you every business and engineering library, and any place with "New" or "stone", and there are a lot! It's fine if you're looking for "TX" or "AZ", but that's about it.

>9 lilithcat: If the state abbreviations are capitalized, turning on the 'match case' option for the search would help.

I'm willing to set things up however people agree upon. (I would, of course, appreciate help. Once we have a plan, any volunteers would need to request access to the sources editing facility from staff if they don't already have it.)

One other thought: it might be possible to do something here this via the "Link Venues and Sources" function.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/265882
Unfortunately, after the initial spurt, I wound up being the only person working on that. Then, after I took a hiatus, I returned to find it broken in various ways. (e.g. https://www.librarything.com/topic/305858 ; https://www.librarything.com/topic/309199 )
There were some fixes, so I came back and did some more, but then things broke again, and I've pretty much given up on it. Should it be once again made functional, I'm up for a final push.

>10 SandraArdnas: And you beat me to it. That's what I used to do in Firefox. Just realized that no such option appears by default in Chrome, though, which made me frown a little.

ETA: I said "appears by default." Change that to "is available at all." :-/ https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=687552

So I guess my workaround is browser-dependent.

>12 davidgn: Completely off-topic, but you seem the person to ask about sources not working. Can it be checked what's up with ILCSO? (and what is the proper group or thread for such issues in general?)

>13 SandraArdnas: ILCSO is on a new system. There has been a discussion to move from using ILCSO (the old name) to CARLI (the current correct name). Until I have consensus, I haven't worked on editing the connection details for the source or any of the ~80 libraries in the consortium.

>13 SandraArdnas: lesmel is the other main person who is active on this these days.
And this is the thread where we used to discuss such things:
https://www.librarything.com/groups/libraryaddbookssourc

>14 lesmel: Well, already voiced my agreement. :-)

I haven't had the spare cycles lately to dig into a project that requires actual thought, but maybe we can try to scope the project and split it up.

>11 davidgn: I'll help with editing once a plan is agreed upon.

>15 davidgn: I guess I can assume silence from the official voices of LT as consent. I'll work on ILCSO/CARLI on Monday. I think I can fix the consortium level source tomorrow.

I went ahead and figured out the whole list's states. There are of course the 5 Amazons, and then 11 that I decided to call National, and 14 that I decided to call Multistate. So that's only 1% out of the 2,867 that wouldn't be in a state group.

Note that I couldn't find any information about "CongreGate (A Union Catalog of Faith-based Libraries)" - what a terribly un-googleable name 'CongreGate' is, and no luck with the rest of it either - but I provisionally threw it into National.
- I also put "Avi Chai Foundation - Hebrew Schools Union Catalog Initiative" into National since it reportedly includes hundreds of Hebrew schools around North America, but I'm not sure how much longer it will even exist, since Avi Chai has been intentionally winding down as an organization (spending down all their money except for an endowment that supports a school in Israel).
- And "OCA Americana" appears to be a subset of the Internet Archive containing book scans/data from participating American libraries; I put it under National but it could sure use a clearer name.



Tab-delimited spreadsheet data available here.

>18 Opteryx: Wow, very nice work. :-) That will come in handy.

And for OCA Americana -- comes from here. https://www.indexdata.com/resources/open-content/
And you're right.

Also, why only the Americana sub-collection? Good question. I don't remember. There may or may not have been a reason. I'll try to figure it out tomorrow.

>14 lesmel: >15 davidgn: Thank you both. Will star that thread for future reference

>20 SandraArdnas: If you're talking about the https://www.librarything.com/groups/libraryaddbookssourc link in >15 davidgn: , looks like it's a private group only a few people have access to.

>21 Opteryx: Access should be available upon request. Restricted mostly just because some rudimentary technical knowledge is required to do anything terribly useful, and it is possible to do damage to existing sources.

In short:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights#Etymology

ccatalfo would probably be the best staff member to ask.

>21 Opteryx: Yes, I realized when I posted already and went to star it. *Shrug*

>18 Opteryx: CongreGate: https://www.valleychurch.org/pdfs/WelcomeCenterFeature.pdf - page 4. "...As of October 2014, a first step was made toward that goal. Twelve CSLA member libraries, including two denominational resource centers, from seven states and representing four denominations contributed their records to a single database called CongreGate. (http://cgate.epimetheus.scoolaid.net)"

For the record, Tim has said in the past that creating a bug report of broken sources is appropriate. There's a category for broken sources in the bug collectors posts. This annoys some people; that's unfortunate for them.

>13 SandraArdnas: ILCSO is still broken for now; but there is a working CARLI source. I'd forgotten we ended up with two sources for the same consortium. I'm waiting a couple more days for LT staff to confirm they are cool with disabling the ILCSO source.

>24 lesmel: Ah, thanks.

>25 lesmel: >26 lesmel: ILCSO had been relatively popular among the non-Amazon/LoC sources, from the amount of mentions I've seen of people using it in prior Talk threads, so a dedicated bug thread about its brokenness (and pointing people to the CARLI alternative, which - unlike ILCSO - I hadn't seen mentioned before) seems like a particularly good idea for that source.

>28 Opteryx:

Yes, please.

As an Illinois resident, I use ILCSO a lot, and was not familiar with CARLI.

>26 lesmel: Thanks, will try

edit: search has failed says CARLI repeatedly to everything

>29 lilithcat: "As an Illinois resident, I use ILCSO a lot, and was not familiar with CARLI."

Although CARLI might not be working either at the moment, this digression has turned into a great example of why grouping the sources by state would be helpful. ;) There's probably a lot of other people who are unaware of sources in their own state that they might like to use.

On the other hand, a lot of state consortiums give good results. I have often used the ones from Maine, Ohio, Illinois, Montana...

I would find a breakdown by source type - single library, consortium, small academic, large academic, specialist - more helpful. Splitting by state doesn't really tell me a lot about which source is likely to have the book I'm looking for.

Actually, right now the pop up only shows me the countries through Ukraine, so splitting the USA any way wouldn't do me much good.

>32 MarthaJeanne: Good point. One I'm sure I brought up in one of the threads hashing this out years ago. Actually, pretty sure I actually did it at one point via a spreadsheet, though I seem to recall that was prior to adding a few thousand more.

>33 davidgn: Aha. https://www.librarything.com/topic/195618#5275091
I was correct.

>32 MarthaJeanne: Hit "All Sources" at the top. You must be looking at the Featured list.

>30 SandraArdnas: How are you doing your search? So far, I'm only getting one failure.

>36 lesmel: Curiouser and curiouser. It again failed after spinning and spinning when I tried titles, but immediately gave results with ISBN search. I would think it's set to search for ISBN only, except you got results by title too. Be as it may, thanks, ILCSO was my fave go-to for ebooks of all kinds, so even just ISBN results will work great

I too am not sure why you'd want to group the sources by state. I haven't found that the location of the library within the US makes much difference to finding a particular book I'm trying to catalog.

>38 jjwilson61: It does if you collect 'local' books.

>39 MarthaJeanne: Which I have hundreds of, from several areas. History, genealogy, self-published local fiction and memoirs, all much more likely to be found in the area it's from/about than further afield.

People who get a lot of books from a local library might also want to use that library for adding read-but-unowned books, but if it's not on the list by its local name, they might have no idea there's a consortium it's part of that is on the list. Much easier to pick those out of a smaller state-grouped list (and the few national/multistate exceptions at the top).

(And did >38 jjwilson61: see my graph? There's just soooo many - many states have more sources than most other whole countries do, but it's impossible to tell that while scrolling through thousands mixed in with the ones from the state you're interested in, makes it feel like 'why are there so few from this state' even though in many cases there's actually a lot from that state. For example, Illinois has 38 sources, nearly the same size as Germany's list; but that's only 1.3% of the USA list, and even people from Illinois don't realize everything that is there for them.)

It would be useful to have consortium/group sources in one place too (if it is possible to have multiple entries of a single source on that page)