Using multiple LibraryThing accts to form 1 TinyCat collection?

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Using multiple LibraryThing accts to form 1 TinyCat collection?

1Amsuko
Nov. 28, 2016, 3:55 pm

I'm not looking for a simple copy/paste. As in "oh, just export your LibraryThing collection into a file and then import that file into TinyCat. Repeat for different accounts as needed. You'll only have to do it one time for each one at the beginning. Boom, you've merged several LibraryThing collections into one TinyCat collection." That's NOT what I'm looking for.

I'm looking into using TinyCat to create a lending library for a group, and I'm trying to see how plausibly easy this would be. Let's say Tom, Bob, Harry, and 20 others want to form a library for their club and are willing to contribute books. But by contribute, I mean the books will stay at their house. Tom's books stay at Toms and Bob's books stay with Bob. The Admin of the shared library will just tell Tom someone's asking for his book. Since they meet regularly, actual book-moving is not a problem. The advantage is that there's one TinyCat library for everyone to browse and make requests from, also to keep track of who has what.

If Tom already has 300 books in his personal LibraryThing, but is only willing to make 100 available for the shared library... Bob has 100 but only wants to lend out 20 ... is that possible in an easy way? Can several people contribute their books to a shared library? Can they (or the TinyCat admin) easily add and subtract which of their books appear on the shared library?

For example, maybe Tom and Bob are both admins of some kind to the library? And this would give them an easy way to sign in and say "add these 3 books of mine to TinyCat". Oh, and I no longer want to loan out my nice copy of Blah, it's getting torn up, so "remove this book from TinyCat" (but it's still in his LibraryThing, of course).

Also, would Tom and Bob's personal LibraryThing collections remain secret? Like let's say Harry has a naughty book which he doesn't mind showing in his LibraryThing collection online, but he wouldn't want someone from the club to browse TinyCat, somehow see "this book is Harry's" ... click on "Harry" ... it takes them to Harry's LibraryThing page ... they browse and see all the books he decided to leave out of the shared library. (Hey! I asked if anyone had a copy of Blahington Blah! Harry, you've been holding out on me! Why won't you let us borrow that book?)

OR :(

Does the one admin of the TinyCat shared library have to personally add and subtract their books in a way that's not much better than just entering them as if Tom and Bob just gave me a list with some book titles scribbled on it? (or the same as exporting their libraries, opening them in Excel, deleting titles, and then importing them. The problem with this is also that this creates copies which are not linked to Tom's LibraryThing collection, so if he updates something about the book on his end, it will not be updated on TinyCat. It's also a very likely way to get duplicates.)

I know this is complex, but trying to get a handle on what you can and can't do without setting up a bunch of dummy accounts is surprisingly difficult. Everything only describes TinyCat in a very vague way and says Try it now! instead. Even the FAQ is vague. And I seem to be missing how these forums work, because the organization is insane. So sorry if I haven't sub-categoried this properly.

2JerryMmm
Nov. 28, 2016, 4:09 pm

There's no way to merge accounts. There's also no easy way to move collections between accounts.

Exporting from an account and importing into one account is not hard. Each member would create a collection, say "Tinycat", and put the books they want to share in that collection (books can live in multiple collections at once). Then they would export only that collection, and you would import that file.

There are some issues with importing from one account into another, I know PhaedraB has experience with that. I believe records with ISBNs will just do a brand new lookup for that ISBN rather than keep the data already available.

3.Monkey.
Nov. 28, 2016, 4:49 pm

TinyCat is merely a feature/function of LibraryThing. It is not a special device that functions as a librarian for multiple libraries, it is simply a special way of viewing one's LibraryThing account. You would need to make a separate new account (and share it amongst the group I suppose, for everyone to be able to edit as needed) and import the selected books from each participant.

4PhaedraB
Nov. 28, 2016, 5:15 pm

>2 JerryMmm: Having recently transferred about 3000 records from one account to another, I can state that as of now, there is no easy way to do it.

It's easy enough to export the data, and what JerryMmm suggests is essentially what I did: moved all the books to be moved into a collection and then filtered by that collection. You could use a tag, too.

Unfortunately, he is correct in that the export/import loop is most definitely not closed. If the book has an ISBN, it does a new look-up for it. Any data you changed or corrected in the originating account will have to be changed manually. I did a lot of copy and paste.

Oh, and if it can't find the ISBN, the Add Books import just refuses the item. If that happened, I moved the ISBN to comments or Publication info, and filled in the field manually after the add.

Books without ISBNs will be imported more or less as is, but only for a few fields. Publisher info, for example, will have to be added manually. Other Authors are lost, too (annoying if you have a lot of anthologies).

You can count on Title, Author importing, other fields will depend on the export format you chose. Comments or Private comments don't get imported with any of them. You have to specify at the time of import what collections they will be put in, or how they will be tagged. However, non-ISBN books will go into Your Library only. If they belong somewhere else, you have to do that manually (or with Power Edit).

I decided on exporting only 2-3 dozen books at a time, so I could keep better track of each individual record. I settled on using tab-delimited because that format preserved my tagging. I use a lot of tags.

Whether it's an arduous task or merely tedious will depend on what level of detail makes you happy. I'm super fussy, so it took me from May to November to get the transfers back into the form I wanted them.

5Amsuko
Nov. 28, 2016, 7:00 pm

>2 JerryMmm:
>3 .Monkey.:
>4 PhaedraB:

You've each given me useful information. Thank you!
The following is just my response, and doesn't really contain further questions if you want to skip it. ;)

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I will definitely have to try the custom category and do an export/import and then clean up and hope for no duplicates. Maybe the categories could actually be specific to export date? I don't think LibraryThing has folders or nestled categories/tags, but I could ask a member to create a category or tag that means something like "Books to share with TinyCat 2016 Nov" or such (but shorter). Then we shouldn't get accidental duplicates because if Tom later decides to share 10 more books, he'll have to create a new category/tag "Books to share with TinyCat 2017 Jan" and we'll export that. Either way, it sounds like I will have to do a lot of hand-holding or hope they will just give me their access to their account each time :(

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It's weird to learn that TinyCat is just a LibraryThing account with a different layout. Especially if it isn't export/importing all the details properly like JerryMmm is saying. I picked up that there would be a special LibraryThing collection/acct that it pulled from, but then as I poked around I figured it had to have features like multiple administrators or something.

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As far as I'm getting, it seems you can let patrons check their own books in/out (mmm...we wouldn't want that. Self check out, okay, but check in? No. We would want at a few trusted people to verify that the book actually came back). So I'm a bit dismayed to learn that it's just one LibraryThing acct (no linked accts). - That means multiple people have to use the same acct/password to sign in and do things. But that also means you're letting these people access everything,, (including accidentally messing things up) which isn't good.

Tech-unsavy people can generally get through check in/out (especially if the patron helps them), while still providing that personal touch to make sure the book actually came back. But they could also easily get confused, especially in a less simplified system like I imagine it will be. (Based on how LibraryThing looks) Plus, when every trusted person realizes they are using the same username/password - I don't know how to say this - it just undermines the concept of accountability and security and next thing you know everyone knows the account/password. Because people share it around like it's no big deal. It just happens. It's like a psyche thing or something, I'm not experienced in libraries, but other things, and I swear this happens. It's not the importance of the account that matters, it's "personal" vs "group" logins. And along the same idea, yes bad things can happen, but this "appearance" of accountability is important even if it is a charade.

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Your responses were super helpful and helped me get a quick grasp of how it will have to go down if it happens. Thanks so much!

6PhaedraB
Nov. 28, 2016, 9:55 pm

>5 Amsuko: You can set one password for Admin and another for simply the ability to put things on hold or check out.

7.Monkey.
Nov. 29, 2016, 6:11 am

>6 PhaedraB: Right but they are saying there's a handful of people involved in loaning their books and those people would want to be able to add or remove their books from the options at any given time. They would then need access, or else have to communicate with the admin for every change they wanted done.

8kristilabrie
Bearbeitet: Nov. 29, 2016, 11:08 am

>5 Amsuko: There actually isn't a self check-in feature, only self check-out or place hold. Admins must mark items as returned. To be clear, you can enable patron accounts (via https://www.librarycat.org/admin/settings/patronaccounts) and self check-out (via https://www.librarycat.org/admin/settings/circsettings) without actually giving them your admin login, which will have access to everything, as you mentioned.

If you're concerned that your volunteers will get confused navigating TinyCat, you may want them to attend one of our weekly Wednesday webinars (our final webinar this year will be December 7th, link shared from our Twitter page that day). Or, you can have them watch one of our recorded webinars, on LT's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHdpcxqVcUR4rXciaInacPQ, at their leisure. The webinar goes over the front and back-end of TinyCat, and how it all works. It's rather simple, and was built to be much more streamlined than the vast sea of information that is LibraryThing. We've also got help pages for just about everything in our TinyCat Help Wiki, if you need: http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/TinyCat.

I understand your concern for sharing a "group" login. Unfortunately, TinyCat was built for tiny libraries, many without much need for multiple logins, and this feature has already been discussed with our developers. We aren't planning on adding multiple admin logins/permissions anytime in the near future. Should anything change on that front, we'll be sure to let you know!

9AngolaReeses
Jul. 16, 2017, 4:39 pm

Simply like to register that I and some friends were hoping to do exactly the same thing as Amsuko's original query, creating a loaning library from several individual LT accts. If the responses above are still accurate, then there is no feasible way to do it, because no one in our group is going to be able to commit the time to constantly update multiple LT accounts. It would be a great (and seemingly fairly simple???) addition to make TinyCat able to pull from multiple LT accounts.

10sharinglibrary
Okt. 2, 2020, 8:21 am

Any improvement on that? I am working with a teacher to share her classroom library. Some books belong to the grade level (3 classrooms), so if several tinycat libraries could be made from a single LibraryThing account, I could easily create a grade collection and then 3 different tinycat accounts that would include the grade collection and the classroom collection of each teacher.

I would really appreciate if someone has been improved making that available.
Thanks in advance

11kristilabrie
Okt. 2, 2020, 9:33 am

>10 sharinglibrary: I think the best way for you to achieve what you're looking for would be to utilize Collections and/or Tags in your LibraryThing catalog to organize the library by grade level, collection, etc. You could then highlight each collection/tag on your TinyCat homepage, so visitors/borrowers could simply click the link to the highlighted collections and get what's available to them in one list.

Please look over our Help pages for how you can organize your LibraryThing catalog by Collections and/or Tags: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Collections and https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Tagging, and also our Help page on how you can add links to highlighted searches to your TinyCat homepage, offering a mimic-browsing feature: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/TinyCat:_Settings_%C2%BB_Home_page (the "Pro-tips" section). I hope this helps.