Let's parse the world over a cup of tea. Or more specifically, what I mean to say is that let's extract, filter, analyze about 5 billion uploaded GPS points, about 3 billion nodes, about 362 million ways, in about 16 minutes on a very expensive machine like the Amazon EC2, or in about 25 minutes in a less expensive or but still expensive machine like the MacBook Pro. And to make this more enticing, we will be doing this with JavaScript or more specifically with Node.js. The world I know very intimately, the world that I work very closely with as a developer at Mapbox, is the world of OpenStreetMap, which is the largest living map in the world. OpenStreetMap, in all likelihood, contains the house that you grew in, the parks that you played in, the train stations you got off at, you get the drift. But more importantly, OpenStreetMap gives you the freedom to add your own unique perspective of the world to the map. And even more importantly, it makes this data freely available for anybody to use to parse, create, and build with. In short, OpenStreetMap is yours to keep, grow, and cherish. Before Chai, though, let us have some introductions to the Earth, but as data. The Earth has a staggering data set. Let's take a moment to think about everything that we've seen throughout our lifetimes, right? The sheer diversity of the objects, both natural and man-made, that we've had the fortune to look at. You'll be surprised to know that all these objects in all their diversity and all their entirety can be represented by three simple geometries, which are points, line strings, and polygons. There's also another concept of relations, which I'm going to be ignoring for the duration of my talk, but I'm happy to answer any questions on. Some examples of points are mountain peaks, trees. Some examples of line strings are rivers, roads. And some example of polygons are buildings, lakes, and fields. But how does this data really look to the computer? So when the computer is seeing a point, it's seeing an image like this, or more importantly, it's seeing this JSON structure on the right. I'm going to take some time to break down this JSON structure for you, because it is important for the rest of my talk. So this JSON structure is usually of a type feature collection, which is a collection of the Earth's features. And these features are usually an array of objects. And this is how a feature looks for a point. So it's got a type feature. It's got some properties, which are metadata. And it's got a geometry, which contains, again, a type called point. And it also contains some coordinates. A line string looks very similar to a point, except that here, the geometry is of a type line string. And you have more coordinates than you would in a point. A polygon looks very similar to a line string, but it's got even more points. And the first point and the last point are the same. I spoke a little bit earlier about metadata. So metadata is basically any data that you want to associate with a feature, but that's not related to its geometry. So on OpenStreetMap, this could typically be the name of the person who edited that feature last. It could have the timestamp of when that feature was edited. But more importantly, you can have visual metadata. You could associate properties like color, size, opacity with this data. This is a map of Toronto, where we have visualized several points of pedestrian accidents. And you'll see that these circles are varying in size. Some of these circles are bigger, some are smaller, some are red, some are yellow. And all of this denotes the intensity of the accidents, the number of accidents that occurred, and so on and so forth. Before I move on to the core of my talk, I want to spend some time talking about web maps. This is not directly related to how we're going to parse or process geospatial data, but it contains a really elegant concept about how geospatial data can be broken down into very logical chunks. A web map contains many, many perspectives of the world. It contains a perspective of the world as the moon sees it or as the satellite sees it. It contains a perspective of the world like the birds see it. And it also contains a perspective of the world like you and me see it. And the reason why this is possible is because of the property of zoom. Now, as we zoom in to this map of the United States, you will notice that as you go deeper and deeper, there are more details that are coming up, which means that at any given point of time, the web map holds an immense amount of data. Like it's got data at varying perspectives. It's got data at varying levels of detail. And this is clearly a lot of data, because as people who use web maps on a daily basis, we know that we constantly zoom in and zoom out. But in spite of it, web maps are incredibly fast. And why is that? The reason why this is so is because, one, you're always constraining the web map to a location that you're looking at. So if you're looking at the map of Bangalore, there's no need for the browser to load the entire world. So you already reduce the amount of data that the browser has to load. And the second idea is that of tiles. A web map is basically a giant single quadrant Cartesian grid with slots for tiles. In comfort of speak, I think you can think of it as a matrix. So this is a map at zoom level 2, where you have four tiles on each row and you have four tiles on each column. And the origin of the map is in the top left. And every tile is uniquely identified. And how is this done? So the tile representation involves three different properties. These are z, x, and y, which stands for zoom, x, and y coordinate. I mentioned earlier that it's a Cartesian grid. So you actually go from 0 to 3 and from 0 to 3 in the rows in the columns. And you also have the zoom property in every map that you're seeing. At zoom level 0, the map has just one tile, which contains the z property 0, and the x and the y are obviously 0. At zoom 1, the map has four tiles. So now the zoom remains constant at 1, but the x and the y are varying between 0 and 1. At zoom level 2, you have the zoom property which stays constant at 2, but the x and the y are shifting between 0 and 3. Basically, at zoom n, the map has 2 power 2n tiles, which is why at zoom 2, you have 2 power 2 tiles and 2 power 2 tiles. So that's 2 power 2 tiles on every row and 2 power 2 tiles on every column, which makes it 2 power 2n. And the reason why the map is so fast in spite of loading so many tiles is in spite of showing so much detail is because of tiles. Tiles make it really fast.  So for instance, if you're looking at, say, MG Road, and then you're moving on to Coven Park, there's no need for the browser to request the tiles for MG Road all over again. Like it'll just request the tiles for Coven Park, which brings me to my third idea of caching, that every tile that you request for is always cached. And fourthly, tiles are just very, very simple to imagine even as an abstraction because they're simply objects that are there in the Cartesian grid. But how does this style data really look to the computer? So when the computer is seeing the style data, it's seeing this data in two ways. One, as raster data, where it's loading the map as PNG images. Or secondly, it may be loading the tiles as vector data. This vector data is very similar to the data that we saw earlier in terms of the JSON structure, where you have the type and you also have a geometry. But in reality, this vector data is encoded as binary, which are called proto file buffers. So on the left-hand side, you have the JSON data. And on the right-hand side, you have an excerpt of this JSON data rendered in binary. This is the reason why web maps are so fast because you're constantly just loading binary data. Vector tiles are the reason why they're so fast. Vector tiles can also be rendered client-side, as opposed to raster tiles. So when you're actually requesting for a raster tile, the browser will send a request to the server. The server will retrieve the tile data, generate a picture from all that tile data, and return this picture back to the browser. Whereas when you're using vector tiles, when the browser is requesting data, the data is given to the browser and all the rendering happens client-side. So I'm just going to wait for this slide to finish because you can see that it happens really, really fast and it happens very, very dynamically. And thirdly, vector tiles are very useful because they can be layered. So if you wanted to layer raster images, you would have to retrieve many, many tiles. But if you had to layer vector tiles, where one layer represents, say, all the trees in the world, you filtered the data, just extract the trees, that would be one layer. The second layer could have all the buildings. The third layer could maybe have oceans and you could extract these layers separately, overlay them on the map, and this is completely possible with vector tiles. So essentially, parsing the world really, really fast, the first process is that you parse the world as vector tiles. Of course, this completely excludes things like image processing, which is not what my talk is about, but where what I'm actually talking about is that you're able to parse the world's data really, really, really fast because you're parsing binary data. And the second reason how you can make this parsing extremely fast is by using map reduce. Map reduce is the process where you divide and process and aggregate data in a very parallel distributed manner. But this is, again, a mouthful, right? So what do I really mean by this? Let's break down map reduce, but in terms of vector tiles, what are the reasons that, what are the requirements for you to be able to use map reduce on something? The first property is that the data should be able to be broken up into chunks, into very logical chunks that can then be pieced back, which is completely possible with vector tiles. Secondly, when you're operating on individual chunks and then aggregating the results of these individual operations, you're doing the same thing as operating on the large data set. So for instance, if you want to find out the number of buildings in the world, you would break down the world into tiles, you would find out the number of buildings in each tile, you would put these results together and essentially you would be doing the same thing as finding out the number of buildings in the entire world. Thirdly, the chunks can be operated on in any order. So doing something like this is very similar to doing something like this or doing something like this. Before we move on to tile reduce, I want to show you a teaser of a video that we made when we tried to find out the road coverage on OpenStreetMap and our benchmark with something that the CIA released, which is called the CIA's Factbook. This visualization is on a MacBook Pro and it took about 20 and a half minutes. Essentially, tile reduce is map reduce but on vector tiles. It was written by Morgan Hallocker, who's primarily by Morgan Hallocker, who works at Mapbox and it's an open source library. So all of you are very welcome to use it. The reason why it's so incredibly fast and the reason why it's so incredibly simple is because it's 405 lines of JavaScript. I'm going to take an example of using tile reduce and this involves filtering out all the roundabouts in the world as seen on OpenStreetMap. Here are data chunks, our vector tiles. The operation that we're going to be doing on each vector tile is finding out the roundabouts in each tile and a reduce operation will be to aggregate all these filtered roundabouts. But what does this roundabout feature look like? I'm sure all of you have seen this when you've been driving or going on your scooter, these are these circles that you see anywhere. I'm sure there's so many of them in Bangalore. But as data, what this feature looks like is that it's a line string. It's important to note that it's not a polygon because it's not filled inside. It's a line string and it contains coordinates, many coordinates, some of which have skipped here and most importantly, it contains a property called as junction whose value is roundabout. Let us quickly look at some code and how tile reduce is really, really simple. All tile reduce scripts will have two parts. One is the main part where you require tile reduce and make calls to it and the second script is the map script. So this is a script that's running the map operation or the operation that you want to run on each vector tile and this file will be called for every tile that's there in your tile set. So in our main script, we require tile reduce which is an NPM module. We require any other NPM modules that we may require for our code. We then make a call to tile reduce. We specify the zoom at which our vector tile set is. We give the path to the map script and then we have the sources array which is an array of all the sources that you're operating on. In our case here, we're only working with a tile set from OSM QA tiles and I'm going to give it the name OSM. Now I'm going to move on to the map script which is going to be called for every tile in this tile set and what this map script does is that it has a tile layers variable and this tile layers variable refers to our source. So you have this tile layers variable and you first, it's a feature collection.  In the event that it has a roundabout property, if you're counting the roundabouts, you can just increment your count by one or if you actually want to see the roundabout features, you will just write it to standard output and also every time this script finishes running, it has a callback that leads to the reduce function and here you're just incrementing the count for all the roundabouts in the world and when every tile in the style set has been processed, you can just write your output to standard output and we were running this on an EC2 with all the data of the world and it took about, just gonna wait for it to finish, took about 15 minutes and 48 seconds and we counted about 419, so that's 419,261 roundabouts. This is a visualization of the data, of the roundabouts data. This is all the roundabouts in Paris and this is all the roundabouts in Dubai. One thing that I did not talk about when I spoke about the code earlier is that I've been saying that you can parse the world's data. You can also constrain tile reduce to work on areas that you're really interested in, so this is specified by something called a bounding box and a bounding box, you can think of it as just a rectangle on the map and this includes the minimum x, the minimum y, the max x and the max y. So we do use tile reduce in map box for more things than just making really cool maps and I wanted to take you through some of the stuff that we've done with tile reduce. This project was where we tried to analyze building sizes in various countries and building sizes and shapes in Monaco is what you're seeing on the screen right now. This is OSM analytics, OpenStreetMap analytics which can be used to extract any sort of analytics about OpenStreetMap, like the density of buildings, the density of roads, where are all the roundabouts, all kinds of things. OSM lint is predominantly used to find errors in OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is open for anybody to edit and it's useful to run these scripts to just find out common mistakes that people are making and to maybe send them a friendly note and say, hey, maybe you should fix this. OSM tag starts with something that I wrote for someone who does not want to write code, who does not want to write JavaScript. It just involves like a simple command line command which extracts any feature from OpenStreetMap. You can use it to count features. You can use it to extract just the features. You can go check it out. This was what I spoke about earlier which was comparing the CIA's fact book to OpenStreetMap and this is how the coverage looked for India.  Something that I built in a really short period of time as an exercise was to study the gender of streets in many cities. As somebody who was quite interested in the idea of gender, this is a super fun project where I use style reduce to extract the names of streets and then pass them to another library called Namsor to extract like with some false positives whether a street was named after a man or a woman. But the question is why style reduce really because there are so many other ways to process geospatial data and why would you be interested in using style reduce? I'm gonna take an example where you try to count the number of buildings on OpenStreetMap. Traditionally how you would do this is that you would download the entire OpenStreetMap planet file in XML format which is a very, very big file and then you would set up Postgres. You would import this data into Postgres using OSM to PSQL. You would figure out the table where the buildings are present and then you would run something like this. But if you had to do this with style reduce, you would essentially just download your vector tile set from this URL OSM QA tiles which contains vector tile sets for the world and for every country and you would just NPM install tile reduce. You could also repurpose several modules on NPM which have been made using tile reduce and then you would just write some code and this code would look something like this. I'm not going to go very much into the details but it looks very similar to the code earlier. You just have your main file and you have your map file where you're looking for the building property. So what are the wins really? One is that tile reduce is incredibly fast. It is extremely fast and it's also very, very accessible for somebody who does not want to go through the entire process of setting up Postgres and you can write JavaScript, you can use it. Thirdly, you can also combine multiple sources of data very easily. Like this source variable that you see here is actually an array. So if you wanted to compare two vector tile sets, you could do that. You wouldn't have to set it up twice using Postgres. You can very easily constrain to specific areas in the world. You can make custom maps really, really easily and you can also use it to just extract data and then machine learn with this data. But tile reduce does have a set of quirks. Some of these are that you have these properties or these features that are spread over many, many tiles and when this is the case, every portion of this geometry is going to have a large, you know, decimal value. Like, they're going to be maybe 74 point, I don't know, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 something and when that happens to simplify, when you're breaking into tiles, some of these decimals may be cut off and when that happens, you see these breaks at tile boundaries and secondly, when you're generating tiles, it's a little difficult to accurately generate tiles for small areas because when you do that, at the boundaries, you're probably going to be including areas that you don't want but this difference is pretty negligible when you're working with very, very large areas which is predominantly the use case for using tile reduce. At this point, I'm going to stop and I'm just going to say that I really hope I've given you a good teaser into using tile reduce and I hope that you will use it to analyze any geospatial data that you may have and I'm willing to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you. The scripts that you just saw. Oh, very good question. So the difference between using OSM QA tiles and using overpass is that OSM QA tiles are generated only once every day. So whereas OSM, whereas overpass is querying live data. So, you know, like if you, you can't use tile reduce to find out what happened this second. Yeah, for that, unless you have a tile set of data that happened that second, overpass is easier for that. But there's a difference between the speed of... Yes, definitely, especially for very large areas. I'm not sure if you've used overpass for very large areas but invariably your browser will crash. Yeah, it crashes. Yeah. Try to find out the schools in India. Right. So it's almost crashed. Right, so. Would that work with this or? Yes, it would be very easy with this. You would just need the tag value, the property and the value for schools and then you could use tile reduce with that. Okay, thank you. Yeah, hello. My question is related to, you are explaining about the JAD, which is related to the, you know, the zoom level, right? So my question is how we can associate zoom level with the, you know, the satellite height or, you know, the altitude of the satellite. We are capturing the image. So suppose that if the user interested from the 20,000 kilometer above, 15,000 or the one kilometer above from the earth level. I'm guessing that I'm not sure if I'm qualified to answer this question because I don't work a lot with satellite data. But I think satellites that are closer to the earth are probably capturing images at higher resolution. So like with more detail. So the ones that are farther are probably lowest room levels. But my question very specific towards the, what should be the altitude associating with the JAD? I'm not sure of the answer. Okay, next question is related to the zoom level. So you speaking about, you know, the number of tiles we are loading as for the zoom level to 2 to the power 2 n, right? My question, if my zoom level is not the natural number, it is the decimal, like the 2.5, how to handle that thing? It's probably downed off to the next biggest number. Like when you're loading the tiles. Actually, I tried with the map box plugin. It is not working. It is giving throw me the error. Oh, but we often use like zoom that, that are real numbers. That's what my question, if I have the zoom level 2.5, 3.5, 2.75, how to handle that? How many tiles will occur? Because I tried and it is not, it's giving me error actually. Okay, so the thing is, I think when you're working with, if you're doing this with tile reduce, like you need to have your tiles at the same zoom that you're interested in. So if you're using a map, like this process of real zoom levels is very easy. But if you want to specifically work with tiles at 2.75, there's this module called tippa canoe. That can be used to generate tiles at the zoom level that you're interested in. And then you can analyze it using that same zoom level. Okay, yeah, thanks. Yeah. Hi. Okay, hi. So can this tile reduce? I mean, you also talked about B box, which kind of constrains this thing. So does B box accept a polygon as a constraint? So what I'm trying to do is just to address the same problem about at the end where you have a polygon as a map and you want to kind of do a tile reduce. So can I constrain it by a polygon? So what you could do is, there's something called tile cover, which you can use to generate tiles for a polygon. So once you have these tiles, then it's just a question of working with those tiles. So you would first, the first step would be to generate the tiles for the polygon. But you will still be working only with tiles and this will not be a square, it'll just be many tiles. So then what does B box really do? B box, if you want to use just a rectangle. So in the event that you want to use a rectangle, you can use a B box. It's still a rectangle, basically. That's what I'm trying to do. It is a rectangle, yeah. It's not a polygon. No, it will not accept a polygon value. Like B box is a very commonly used by people working with geospatial data. So I guess it's a useful, you know, parameter to have for tile reduce to pass. So what is open street maps policy regarding mapping, like sensitive buildings and government areas? Is there any policy you're not supposed to encroach or things like that? So the idea is that all of the data is licensed under ODBL, but it's completely free for people to build even commercial products on. So you can, you can, there are areas of military that have been marked on the map. It's there on the map, yeah. It just depends on what people want to mark, yeah. Hi, I just wanted to understand when things fall in the boundary. Say for example, a building, a tree or whatever it is, with so many number of tails, like how do you count it? Like do you count it as a two or one, like whenever? I, can you repeat it? Like if, do you mean like? Let's say that you are counting some particular entity. Okay. And now we are dividing into tiles. Okay. And a couple of these entities fall in boundaries. Say for example, they come in both the tiles then. Very good question. Really good question. I'm glad you asked. So the thing is, when a lot of this, when I spoke about was associated with open street map and all of these features have unique IDs. So when you're counting, you're essentially counting those unique IDs. So, you know, in spite of having multiple features, these features will have the same ID and you'll just be counting that number. So if you have your own vector tiles set, it's best to have a way to uniquely identify each feature so that the count is accurate. Yeah. All right, thank you everyone.


Girls Inspire helps girls learn life and vocational skills to gain employment and engage in the economy. Rapparigesh Keshpi renseeru siklu du kazamento infantil prekozi forza da travesh da kunsiadida sa immobiliza saun da comunidade. Girls Inspire gave me back my right to education. We believe girls can inspire positive transformation in their families, in their communities, and in their lives. Now I am empowered to earn balance against child and remarriage in my community. I now have a dream to become an engineer. My girls will not be raised to leave marriage is the solution to poverty for girls.


actually sat for a while struggling with what an online version of Bagels with Ben would look like but I knew that student interest was there because students emailed me and said can you can you please host something like that online because I really miss it or other people would tell me I was actually waiting until you know later on in the term to participate and now I guess I won't get a chance to and so it was apparent to me that the interest was there that the demand was there it was just a matter of trying to figure out how to how to how to create that kind of experience for students are about to share something that's a little more private that's a little more personal I do make it a point to make sure that everyone is aware you know this stays within this space and it's for the sake of preserving this sense of community but I have I bring these bagels so that it's a it's in and of itself is a talking point without requiring the students to do too much thinking I don't know a facial mask that I have at home my wife and I have a bunch and so I brought out one and I encouraged other people to to to to bring out their own facial products as well and some people did like muck masks and other people did other kinds of masks someone did a hand mask as well and it was just really it was just really interesting to to to see the different types of products that people had but also really interesting and fun to see everybody being so engaged in that kind of medium that they would actively participate it's nice to see people being so open and and personal to to to other people and that's certainly maybe you don't have the same kind of sharing of food obviously with people on this online forum because you physically can't but people certainly still bring that same kind of that that same kind of atmosphere that ambience to the to the to the meetings I think at least just from talking to students and from the teaching evaluations that that for myself that that I've seen it seems like students become really motivated to do well in the course if they can identify with the faculty member they can identify with the instructor if they really like the instructor and I would like to think that through doing this they like me a little more and you know people would talk about how you know they were worried about this course but it you know through all these opportunities to interact with other people and with me they become more motivated more interested in the course and I think that motivation come not compels motivates further the subsequently motivates them to do well in the course because why would you want to do well in the course in which don't really that you don't really care about or you know that you feel very sort of isolated from other people so I'm hoping that this sort of breaks down that kind of barrier I still try to maintain some level of you know some level of separation and professionalism with students and students do comment on how I do seem to be able to strike that balance between you know keeping a professional relationship while also establishing a sort of very informal friendly relationship with with the students and I think you know everybody has a different calculus in terms of what they're comfortable with in with regard to the balance between professionalism and informality and friendliness so that's up to individuals to that decision is up to individuals to make but I really do think that connecting with students in some way right beyond just teaching them in a classroom setting I think that kind of connection is beneficial for for them and it's definitely been beneficial for me because I learned things from my students as well


Friends, greetings on the sixth International Day of Yoga. I'm very happy to note the growing popularity of yoga in the last few years and especially among the youth. We are marking the sixth Yoga Day in extraordinary times. Usually Yoga Day is about public events, mass participation. This year, Yoga Day goes indoors. The theme of the year is yoga at home and yoga with family. Friends, the world is fighting a pandemic of monumental scale, but yoga provides multi-dimensional solutions to the multiple challenges COVID-19 has brought. Yoga gives you the opportunity to know your immune system better and put in the extra efforts were needed. Yoga has the potential to cater to mental, physical and psychological challenges. It puts to test how one can live in challenging times. Friends, yoga offers something for everyone. It enables strong mind and healthy body. In the post-COVID era, the focus on preventive healthcare will get stronger and that is why I'm confident that yoga will become even more popular. Friends, these are times of distancing. But do you know that yoga is what ends distance? It is said, yu jyate anen iti yoga. Yoga is that which joins or brings things together. Yoga ends various kinds of distance. Distance between our mind and body which is the root cause of many problems. Distance between the life we have and the life we want to have. Distance between our expectations and reality which can become a source of stress. Friends, the regular practice of yoga gives emotional strength and empathy. We begin to understand that others would be going through the same struggle as us. So we become a shoulder of support for someone in need of it. Friends, the COVID-19 pandemic may have reduced our mobility but it should not affect our enthusiasm towards yoga. People have been sharing innovative ways to practice yoga in times of the pandemic. They are also sharing how they will mark yoga day on the 21st. This is a great sign. This time, small is marked and small is good. Respecting the present situation, let us mark the sixth international day of yoga from our homes with our family. And let us follow all norms of social distancing. Let us make yoga more popular and our planet healthier. Thank you.


Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, a webcast, online show, whatever your preference for terminology is. We are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. If you are unable to join us on a Wednesday, that's fine. We do record the show every week, so you can go to our website and watch any of our previous recordings. I'll show you where those are at the end of today's show, where you can see where our archives are. We have the YouTube account recordings for any of the shows, any websites people have mentioned during the show are posted there. If there are any presentations like PowerPoint slides or handouts or documents, we try and collect that all for our archives for watching later. Both the live show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with any of your colleagues that you think may be interested in any of the topics we have here, any of your colleagues, friends, neighbors, family, anybody really who you think something might be of interest to them, send them to our live shows to sign up or to watch any of our recordings that are out there. We do a mixture of things here on the show. Finally our only criteria is that it is something library related, presentations, interviews, book review sessions, mini training sessions, demos of products and services out there. We're really pretty broad. Any types of libraries, big, small, rural, urban, educational, academic, K-12, public, anything. The only criteria I have for this show. We do have some Nebraska library commission staff to come on and do presentations here about things that are going on here in Nebraska or things that are Nebraska-centric, potentially. But we also do bring in guest speakers as we have this morning. On the line with us from the East Coast is Tim Spalding who is the founder and CEO of Library Thing. Good morning, Tim. Hi, how are you doing? Hi. Also, Christy Kennedy who works with Library Thing as well, specifically in this TinyCat program, this service that they have, and we'll get more into that. That's the whole point of the show here. Today's talk about TinyCat. The Library Thing, I'll let you guys talk about that. I actually have my own Library Thing account that I need to update more, but it's been around for quite a long time. I'm just going to hand over to you guys, Tim and Christy, to talk to us about Library Thing and TinyCat. Before you get started, though, I didn't want to know, we had looked at it before, did you guys want to do the webcams? You don't? No. No. You just want the full screen. That's okay. I love the demoing of everything and showing the website. That's perfectly fine. I would love to show my messy hair, but let's not. Exactly. Exactly. Not a problem. All right. So I'll just hand it over to you guys. Yeah. Tell us all about Library Thing and TinyCat. Thanks. Thank you for the introduction. Thanks for the opportunity to be on here. My name is Tim Spalding, and Christy Kennedy is going to be driving, and I'm going to be talking for the beginning of this, and then Christy is going to take over. I am the founder of Library Thing. So let's just start by getting out of the way that you've heard of Library Thing before, probably. It's a site for people to catalog their books, including many libraries. Small libraries have been using it to catalog their books for a long time. TinyCat is a separate product that grows out of Library Thing, and I'm going to be showing you that. Lastly, you may have also heard Library Thing in connection with a product we have called Library Thing for Libraries, and that in turn has become something called Syndetics Unbound, which is distributed by ProQuest, and this is my plug for saying that I'm going to be at ALA hanging out in the ProQuest booth, and I'd love to talk to anyone, have a beer with anyone who was on this as well. Okay. I was wondering about that. I had seen that when I was doing some research looking at things in your site about the whole exchange from Library Thing for Libraries. We do so many things. Yeah, well, we made a joint product, but TinyCat is very much only ours. It's not distributed by ProQuest, and it was programmed entirely by us, so that's what we're going to talk about. So TinyCat is, as it says there, a real library catalog for small libraries for tiny libraries, and Tiny actually means that the library needs to have 20,000 or so items or fewer. So if you're listening from a larger library, this might be the time that you want to leave. However, this is going to be a good option for you to tell people about. In our experience, librarians are always coming to us and saying, my library is larger than this, but we're often being asked by churches and synagogues and historical societies and clubs and other small libraries that I know, and this is an excellent choice for those. So 20,000 items or less, 20,000 records or less, we can push it, but we don't want to be too close to the line. So 20,000, 25,000 in that area. Okay. So TinyCat is a library catalog for small libraries. You can see some of the basic things there, simple, powerful, mobile, rather than giving you some kind of deck, you can find out all about this at the librarycat.org website. There's a little video and so forth that can give you the basics, but let's go a little bit deeper than the basics. So let's go to the next tab if we can, Kristi. So all of this grows out of library things. Library thing was something that I started 11 years ago for regular people to catalog their books. We were actually before Goodreads, but these days I think I have to say we're kind of like Goodreads. The difference is library thing is more library and focused, more catalog focused, a little nerdier. It's a great way to catalog your collection, but it has social aspects as well. So for a long time now, people have been using library thing to catalog small libraries. So you can go ahead, Kristi, and sign into that folio one if you can. Folio is one of the libraries that was cataloging with us. And you can see here what their homepage looks like on library thing. And yeah, Kristi, if you can click on your books, here's a list of the books that they have. This is a library in San Francisco. Now, this is great, but it is not what an OPAC looks like. This is not a link that you want to give to your patrons. This would confuse them. And if we can just click on a book, why don't we just choose like the book of Marjorie Kemp there, the third one. You can see that this is a very good looking, very powerful page about the book, but it has way too much information for a library catalog. And it links you off to all these great social features like seeing other people that have the book and so forth that is way more than a library catalog should present. So for a long time, people were using it to catalog their small libraries, but it wasn't something that you would ever want to give to a patron because it would melt their minds. So yeah, people did actually do this. And then the patrons would click something and they'd find themselves in someone else's catalog. And then they would say, why can't I get this? And the answer is because it's a great big hairy social system and not a library catalog. So let's move on to the next tab and show you TinyCat. TinyCat takes a library thing catalog and takes all the good things of that, like the ability to add books in a very simple, easy way. Library thing is great with mark records, but you don't need mark records even search off of Amazon. Anyone can add books to library thing. It's a very simple system. It takes all of that goodness, but it presents it in the form of a much more traditional, albeit powerful library catalog. So this is the Folio Seattle Athenaeum and this is their homepage. They have a lot of control over this. There's this little bit busy for my tastes, but you can see they've got a moving thing going on there with recent books, books that they choose to highlight. You can change that in various ways. They've also got some subject browsing links above that and some contact info. Let's go ahead and search, though. Let's search for, say, travel within the... Do you want to dive into my own catalog or dive here? Oh, yeah. Well, actually, let's do one or two searches on this. Sorry. Yeah, great. Let's try travel. So you can see here, it comes up very quickly. It's a very fast catalog, much faster, frankly, than catalogs that will cost you $50,000 a year. It's a really fast catalog. It comes up with simple results. You can see here, you can scroll through them. One thing that I think is really cool here is that over on the right, you have full fastening. Fastening is becoming more common, but it's still a feature of really expensive catalogs. But you've got full fastening over on the right. So if we want to see only those travel books that relate to nonfiction, for example, under genre, you can click that, and it will quickly narrow it down for you in that way, give you new facets over there on the right. So it's a really powerful way of getting into a collection quickly and seeing what's there. Let's jump into your catalog, actually, and let's search for, say, Harry Potter. And up come the results very quickly. And this is sort of the point where, Christie might not say this, but I'm going to say this is the programmer. We did everything right. So the reason why it loads so quickly is that it has two JavaScript files instead of 30. Every single page here is exposed to the web. You don't need to pay an extra service to have your library catalog be on the web with permanent URLs rather than these terrible session-based URLs that most library catalogs have. The pages are very slim. The pages are mobile. So, Christie, if you could just take your screen and just drag it to the left. You'll see how everything, resize it to the left. How do we get out of full screen? Oh, that's a good point because you're in full screen. You've got to click on the green arrow. Yeah, yeah. But I can't see. Oh, there we go. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yeah, so everything was built mobile ready from the ground up. If any of you want to go hit this from your cell phone, you can. You can see, as Christie makes the screen small, how everything adapts. Certain information is elided. Things are displayed in a format that's really great for a cell phone. So from the ground up, mobile ready, not a separate URL, not a separate catalog. And as I said, everything is automatically on the web. All the pages could be indexed by Google. We did everything right. OK, enough cheating on my own horn. Let's move on to looking at a book. Let's look at a book, not a movie. See that here. Yeah, that's a good one there. So here's a detail page within your catalog. And you can see it's got all the information that you'd want to have and, in fact, more. So you've got the standard stuff, like tags, like subjects, and so forth. But you've also got tags, drawing from 130 million tags on library thing. You've got rating, which is drawing from 18 million, I think, ratings on library thing. You've got awards coverage. You've got media reviews. You've got one book and so forth. You've got user reviews coming in from library thing. I'll let Christy go into this a little bit more detail, but even similar books. If you like this book, you're going to like that book. The sorts of features that most library catalogs don't have, you're getting within TinyCat. That's it for me. I want to turn this over to Christy, who, although I programmed this, Christy, demos this a lot more. So let me have you do the, I've shown the trees. Let me have you show the bark. OK, great. That sounds great. Thanks, Tim. Well, I'm going to go actually jump back to the search page, because there is a few things that I wanted to show you that the home page was reviewed fairly well. Why don't I go back and actually jump to the home page? We'll go from the front all the way into a detail page. So just on top of the other things that you can add to your home page, you can include links or content above and below your animated cover display. And you can actually include them as a simple list of links, or you can include formatted HTML. It just gives you a little bit more formatting to your text. And there's many ways that you can do this. As you can see from Folio's home page, they've got links to specific collections or genres or tags or whatever. You can include library hours. Whatever you need, it's all customizable. I've even embedded my little Twitter feed down here. Let's go back into search page. And I'll show you a few other highlights, aside from search facets. Looking at to the right here, you can actually sort your searches as well. So searches are default sorted by relevancy on TinyCap. But you can also sort your searches by acquisition, by title, publication date, author, and popularity, which is calculated by library thing. And just to jump in here, so many library catalogs are still only sorting by acquisition, by the entry date. So if you want to, proof is in the pudding here, go to one of these catalogs and do some searches. And I think you'll find the relevancy very good. Yeah, and so you can see as I sort it by popularity, Harry Potter is right at the top. That makes sense. That's a pretty popular book. Beneath the book covers, you'll see that I've got these little email icons, meaning I can actually email this item directly to myself or somebody else. If I want to start building a starred list, I would click this little star icon beneath my book covers. And starred lists are great for things like research projects or reading lists, anything that you sort of need to get a list of. And you'll see that as I'm adding books to my starred list, it's tallying up in the top right here. Once I've got my starred list ready, I can actually click straight through at the top right. And I've got all of my starred items here. And I can actually go ahead and email the list to myself, to my research partner again, whoever I need. And it's shared right there. Stard list on Tinycat are all session based. So with each new browser session, this list will clear for you. Let's go back to our search. We'll try, actually, let's go to a detail page. And a few other things I wanted to look over on the detail page. You'll see that, again, under the book covers, I've now got social media sharing buttons as well. So your visitors and patrons can share specific items on their Facebook or Twitter or wherever they want. I also want to go over the self-checkout feature. You can actually enable self-checkout for patrons. Tinycat has three circulation modes available. One, you can actually disable certain patron accounts altogether. Two is simple circulation mode, which I am currently in. You'll see if I click the checkout button here. The hey, what's the password? This means I am in simple circ mode. Simple circulation is really great for high trust environments.  And then full circulation mode is where each patron will get their own login. So let's go ahead and enter my password. Once I've entered that, I've got access to all of the patrons in the system. So I can go ahead and check this item out to whoever I need. As you'll see, I've got mostly Harry Potter characters. Let's check this out to Bill Weasley. All right, I've clicked checkout. And now that item status is automatically refreshed to check it out. It cannot be checked out by anybody else. And I've even customized it so it's showing the due date. Another feature that we've got, we have this wonderful little ask about this feature. This is particularly useful, especially if you're not allowing self-checkouts for patrons. You can show this without your checkout or place hold buttons. If a visitor can just easily click that and fill out the information that they need. You can customize the little pop-up message here. All they have to do is enter their name, email, and a comment. Maybe I want to check this out. I click submit. And now my request has been sent to the library admin and they can reach back out to me with my request. Now you have the option of choosing what type of circulation you want and you can also have or not have the ask about this button as you like. Yeah, all customizable. What else did I want to go over? Let me show you, series is a good one because series coverage in many library catalogs is not really good. So actually, I think you only have two Harry Potter books but by clicking on it. I know, I'm working on it, I'm working on it. The series coverage is exceptionally good and is easily available here and all this stuff comes free, right? If you, many of these things, if you wanted to put them in your library catalog, you'd have to get syndetics on down that would cost you many thousands of dollars but it's all available here for free if you're a small library. Perfect. I'm gonna jump out of my full screen mode here just so I can see my link to log into the admin portal. So that's pretty much the front end of TinyCat. Oh, also, let me see, actually, let me touch upon your advanced search. So on top of the regular search that you have here, if you just click this little carrot icon, the button right to the right of your search bar, you can actually reach your advanced search page which uses Boolean search logic and or search syntax and you can pretty much run any search that you need. You can even limit your search by collection, by language, or by media type. No patron will ever do this but I think some people want it so we have it. Yeah, yeah, okay. I think we can go ahead and dive into the back end of TinyCat, what I like to call the admin portal. So you see in the bottom right hand corner, we've got this little log icon. If I'm already logged in, it'll show up as a little house and I can just click that to log into my account and it's the same username and password as your library thing account. All right, go back to full screen mode. All right, so this is your admin portal. This gives you everything that you need as an admin to manage your TinyCat. You've got a link back to your catalog homepage, all of your settings pages where you're customizing the look and function of your catalog, your check in and out page where you can check in and out multiple items, history of transactions, your patrons page where you can add and import, edit, delete your patrons. You can manage your TinyCat subscriptions through your billing page. We've got this wonderful library thing links page which I'm gonna actually open up into another tab. This page is particularly useful if you are not comfortable using library thing, if you didn't start out on library thing and you don't really wanna get lost, this will give you everything that you need from your ad books page where you're actually cataloging your books, all of your import options, a link to our app and we should actually get our Android app there now since that just was released. She had my issue there. Yeah, yeah. Wait, you have a library, you have an Android app now? Oh, for library thing? I've been waiting for that so long, thank you. It is here. It's here. Yes, so everything. Yeah, well we just released it yesterday. Yeah. Yeah, so. There's a fun video being posted now or just posted where one of our employees with her boyfriend cataloged 200 something books and did it with a rapid motion camera or a slow motion camera so you could see them running around scanning everything in a small period of time. It's fun. One thing I wanna drop here is that all of this administrative stuff is also mobile ready, okay? So that you could be changing all of this on the bus or on your iPad or wherever. We assume mobile from the very start everything is built for mobile. Mm-hmm, yep. Okay. Another useful link is your help page here. This will direct you to your TinyCat help wiki and I'm not sure if I'm able to add this into the chat. But this we've written help pages pretty much on anything that you'll need. I will be very briefly going over the settings pages but this TinyCat help wiki has much more detail. So anything you might need, you know, you can always check here first. We've even written help pages for your patrons in case they need to know how to self-check out, things like that. But, you know, of course, if you can't find what you're looking for, you can always email us. We also have a discussion group on library thing where people talk about it and... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that that group is also right under your library thing page here. Let's go ahead and dive into our settings pages. So as you'll see on the left, you've obviously got a lot of different settings. So I won't be going into great detail but I'll sort of just give a one-sentence summary of what each settings page does. And if any of you have any questions, feel free to go ahead and post in the questions chat or raise your hand as Krista explained earlier. So our basic settings page is where you can view your account type. You can see if you're an all volunteer or a paid staff library. To explain the difference between the two, TinyCat is sort of a scaled, a pay scale for how you pay for your subscription. So it's based on what your library type is if you are... We can throw that at the end. Yeah, we can do that. But anyway, yeah. So you can also change your library name and decide which collections you want to include from library thing here. Your content settings is where you're going to decide what type of book covers you want displayed, which genres and collection labels to show, and you can even allow custom JavaScript. If you have a team member that knows JavaScript, that is great. Actually, one useful library that I've got a good example of that is our Center for Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies Library. What they have done is they have created, actually got to pop right back out of full screen mode. They've made this reservation and appointment form using the custom JavaScript feature. And this just helps add a little bit more flavor to your catalog if you're looking for that. All right. Your homepage settings, pretty self-explanatory where you can completely customize your homepage. You can upload your company's logo, include those links above and below your animated cover display, whatever you need. We've got the simple list of links or the free HTML if you know how to add a little bit more formatting to your text. Your search page settings is where you're going to decide which fields you want to allow to be searched and what patrons are able to see for content and search facets. Your detail page settings is where you can customize that ask about this feature that we went over. You can actually change the name of the button if you want. You can include links to library thing or Amazon, and you can customize this wonderful little mark view feature that you can include on the bottom of your detail pages, kind of a fun feature for librarians. Notice the sharing though. I mean, there's automatic sharing to all of the major services. Yeah, so if a visitor or a patron can click on the logo, you can decide which links you want to include under your book covers. So I can have all of these disabled and it will show nothing under my book covers or if I just deselect that, it'll just show the icons to Tumblr and the starred list and they can either build a starred list, email items or share a specific item on their social media accounts. I like how you have under the mark view on, in parentheses, the four librarians. Indicating that for the common non-librarian person, don't worry if you don't understand what the heck this means. Yeah. Yeah, I don't really think mark views are great, but people want them, so they're there. They are what they are and they're still used in behind the scenes of things, so it still needs to exist for the moment. So there it is. Wonderful. All right, so the detail page sections, again, pretty self-explanatory. It's very simple to add or remove fields to and from your detail pages here. We've got a lovely little drag and drop feature so you can reorganize your fields. We have two visual spacers, so you can have up to three different sections on your detail pages. To remove a field from your detail page, just click the little X at the right and it'll drop it down into your inactive fields area. If you want to add a field, just click the up arrow. It'll add the field to the bottom of your detail page and then you can drag and drop where you want that field to live. Very simple. We set up all the defaults well. We didn't include everything. I'm a firm believer that including everything is including less. So we have good defaults, but then you can make up your mind in what ways we're wrong. Yeah, and you can even restore two defaults if you just want to go back to basics. All right, your patron settings, this is where you're deciding how you want your patron names to be entered and displayed. It's also where you can decide which patron fields to use and where you're going to generate your barcodes. Your patron account settings. This is where you're going to decide if you want to enable self-checkout. Again, you can disable it. SimpleCirc, we reviewed. And then full circulation mode, if I actually click save and go to my home page, just to give you a hint, you'll be able to tell you're in full-circ mode because you've got this little person icon in the top right. So if I'm a patron, I can actually log into my account here and then I've got access to all of my current and historical barring. I can view or edit whatever information that the admin has allowed me to view and or edit all right there.  And I can show you that on our patrons page. Your circulation settings is where you can actually customize all of the patron actions that we went over. You've got admin actions, setting your call number system, everything that you need for circulation is right here. And then finally contact info settings. This is mainly for library things, library things use. We do require at least a name and an email in case your account gets disabled and we want to make sure that it wasn't, if there was an issue or something with your account. We just want to make sure that you've got the support that you need. All right, and that's basically the settings that any questions that anyone had. Krista, are we all set to go? I'll dive into the check in and out page, I think. Check it out, yeah. Yeah. No, nobody has any questions yet. If you guys do have any questions about the presentation or what Christy and Tim are showing here, let me know. I did have one question when you were looking at the details, the different parts that could be in the record that displays. Mm-hmm. Yeah. This is all very customizable, like you said. If there's anything, is this similar to open source? Is this still a work in progress with some librarians as, hey, there's something I'd like to have in here that's not here? I can't imagine looking at this what that might be, but you never know. Is there still, could they contact you guys about, well, what about this field or that information? Well, as I mentioned before, there's a discussion group on library things. Oh, okay, that'd be a place to bring up that kind of thing. Yeah, and people say, oh, I want this, and then other people will say, well, actually, you can do it this way. You know, we have a short list of the next things we're working on, but yeah, I know it's a work in progress, and we're a small nimble company that can do stuff. I have to say that I have often seen ILS, SOPAC companies get hung up on implementing everything that everyone wants. Oh, yeah. Tinycat is really trying to come up with a solution that is gonna make people happy, but you're not paying us $50,000, so we're not gonna do the silly thing that we shouldn't do. Of course, yeah. Oh, I've seen it. All right, I'll go ahead and dive into the check in and out page now. So this is where the admin can actually check in and out multiple items. This is very easy to use. You can actually scan or search to build your item list. You can scan your barcodes if you have them, or your ISBNs, whatever you need. Let's go ahead and just add a couple items to our list now. We'll do barcode 37 and barcode 48. Now, this is brought back more than one search result. If that happens, I can just quickly click the title that I needed on my item list. Once I've got my... Notice that you can do it by title here. So, you know, somebody can do this who is not, who's not a librarian who doesn't understand what a barcode is, right? This is very simple. Yep, pretty easy. Once I've got my item list, I can select which item status I need. You can customize your own statuses as well. Then you can actually scan your patron's barcode to add them to the page, or you can actually search by their name. If I'm entering names and I enter up to three characters of the name, we have a patron name autocomplete feature where we will automatically find whatever patrons you've got in the system with that string. So, I'm gonna go ahead and check these items out to Neville on the bottom. The date is defaulting to today, and it's already auto-filling in my default circulation period, which is nice. I click save. It's telling me those are saved. And if I jump over, use my shortcut here to go into my transactions, those are right at the top as expected. So, wonderful. It's actually a nice transition to our transactions page. You can see I used my shortcut, but you can also just dive right from your admin portal and go right to the same place. So, you're gonna see your active transactions first. Those that are currently open. You can also click to all transactions and view items that have been returned or otherwise closed. You can view your transactions by title. So, if you've got multiple lending statuses for one item, they will cluster up here. This is not alphabetizing by title, but just clustering them up by item. And they're always sorted by the most recent date first. And then I can also use my statuses page here to look at specific lending statuses. I can look at just my checked out items, just my overdue items, whatever I need, all right there. Let's go ahead and dive into our patrons page. So, again, this is where you're adding or importing your patrons. I've got my wonderful list of Harry Potter patrons here. If I need to edit a patron, I can just click the pencil icon to the right, edit whatever information I need. You've also got the option to delete your patrons here. You can merge patrons. So, if you've got a volunteer that accidentally created a duplicate patron, you can actually merge patrons. So, you can clean up your patrons that way if you need. And that was a request. Someone said, you know, help library thing. We made all these extra ones. Can we figure out how to merge them? And so, we made that for them. Yeah, you can import your patrons instead of adding them one by one. You can have this very easy import option. I'll actually demo this for you right now. It's a quick three-step process. Bear with me here is my, the last couple of webinars that I've done for TinyCat, the, my computer has wanted to be very slow. So, it's not TinyCat, it's just my computer. Did you click Bros? No problem. We understand. Yeah, I don't know. I've had some speedages with my computer. I think my hard drive is just getting a little tired. That's not good. Yeah. So, I've got my patron import sample file here. So, it's just CSV format that we accept for now. So, I'm going to upload my selected file. It's gonna bring me to my patron mapping page. So, I'm just matching up the fields that I've got in the system for my patron fields with those that are in my import file. And again, it's the drag and drop feature. So, I know I don't have country. Gonna remove that. Just drag this down. Swap these two. Once those are all matched up and looking good, click submit. And now all of those patrons have just been imported into the system very quick.  And do not worry, if you accidentally click that button, you actually have to confirm twice before we will do that. Same thing with your transactions. All right, and then if folks have noticed this little hashtag or pound icon here, this is if you're in full circulation mode and you have required patrons to have a password with their barcode for logging in. You can generate a new password here. And at this point, you just wanna read or have them write it down on a slip of paper, some secure way of passing over the password to that patron because once you click okay, you will not see that password again. And you can do the same thing if you need to reset the password. So, no big deal. By the way, all of this is happening over SSL. That's HTTPS. So, it is by default secure, which is rare for systems. Yeah, that's pretty much it. That's usually what I go over on the back end for admin portal. Let's show the library cat page so we can show some pricing. And then while you're looking at that, you can think up questions, yeah. That is a question that someone did type in. I was waiting for you to get the demo. Somebody did say how is the cost determined for this? Yeah, so the basic idea is personal is free, okay? So you put your own books in, that's free. Lots of library thing members have used it. And in fact, lots of the suggestions we've made for making it better have just come from regular people who wanted a know pack, which is a crazy desire, but nevertheless, it exists. People with huge collections, you loan out books to people you know, your friends and family. You want to figure out and remember who the heck took this one, yeah. Exactly. So the basic distinction we make is between volunteer and paid staff. So what's the definition where we currently are saying? Volunteer is basically where you know, basically nonprofit organizations are usually nonprofit. If you've got a budget of less than $500 a year and that's not included donation. If you just get donations, then you're considered a volunteer library. Or if there's no one that is paid to actually manage the library, you're volunteer. And then the other one is paid staff and that's everyone else. And as you can see, it then happens, it then works upon a number of items, number of records that you have. So the most you can pay is $35 a month, which is pretty cheap.  And 20,000 is your limit of items. That's the max that it can hold. We can push that. If you're coming in with more than 20,000, then you're gonna have difficulty growing much past that. We can easily push it to 25, but I think we're staying in that sort of area. Frankly, one way that people often use library thing is you can catalog your books on library thing. You can use TinyCat. You can then, when you get that giant grant, when your library gets larger, you can export all of your records as Mark and use some system that costs you $10,000 a year. By putting your stuff into library thing, like by using TinyCat, you're using a true cataloging utility that imports and exports Mark unlike Goodreads or something like that. That's a good way to get started, yeah. I've heard of a lot of other people saying that they need to pay to actually have the records exported. Or from other services, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we'll even make Mark records for your Amazon things, which is strange. Well, like you mentioned, if you get that grant, which we do give out here at the commission for things like this, just as a plug for us. Yeah, that's the way to get that done if you do have a previous place where all the records are and you wanna get them into this or whatever. You get a large grant, you can also just pay us more. It's possible. Out of the kindness of your heart. I know for library thing, there is the, I remember back when I first signed up, there was the options of choosing how much you wanted to pay for having your basic library thing account. I did a lifetime one. Well, in fact, if you use TinyCat at all, your library thing account is free. If you're only using library thing, there is a fee still associated with it, but there are so many holes in it. One of the holes is if you use TinyCat, it's free. If you use the Android or iOS app, it's free, so it's basically free. Yeah. So what questions have you got? Yeah, well, the cost was, is anybody, yeah, anybody have any questions about TinyCat and how to use it, anything you wanna know more about it? Type into the questions section. Let us know if there's anything, some of you who might have catalogs and you're thinking about switching to this or using this for something. And of course, we do have on the line actual, we're talking librarians here. So you may get those kind of questions. Yeah, please. Everybody looks at the, who looks at the, who looks at the mark display, but I'm weird, so. Ah, well. Yeah. So actually, one question just came in, does TinyCat support Z39.50 searches? So the cataloging on TinyCat, which is done on library thing, we connect to more than a thousand, I think we're way over a thousand now. I wanna say over 2,000, right? Yeah, because we had this massive new effort. Yeah, let's look at 2,300 something sources from all around the world. And so you can catalog, copy catalog, from thousands of sources all around the world, more than half of those sources are actually from the United States. Can you do a find for Nebraska, see if there's anything in Nebraska? Let me see, U.S., so. There's a lot there, anyway. There we go. Nebraska, there we go, Omaha Public Library, so you can catalog. Oh, yep, Metro Community College, Omaha Public. You can catalog for me, oh, Pioneer, that's one of our consortiums, we've got one here, yeah. And of course, UNL, yep, that makes sense. So copy cataloging, yes. TinyCat does not present a Z39.50 interface for other people to catalog from, although library thing has lots of data that's available for free, there's no Z39.50 for your catalog. To bring things in, yeah. We're putting stuff out, I mean. Oh, right, right. Yeah, yeah, but you probably don't wanna do that, so. How do, and you said about the importing all the records into TinyCat, how if a library's just getting started for the very first time doing anything electronic, what's the best way for them to try and get something ready to be able to use this? Is it, I mean. Yeah, so. You know, they've been doing things in paper still, they are like the small church library, the small school, whatever. So you can catalog on library thing on this page here. You can use a barcode scanner if you have one, or you can buy one from us. We have. The app is really quick too. Yeah, and then the other option is get the app. There's an iOS app, there's an Android app, the Android app, both of them actually scan barcodes, so you can type in the ISBN if you want, or you can just pass your phone over a book and it magically scans it. When you do that, you can, by default, it will take the records from Amazon, but you have a simple setting where you can change so that it takes the records from library sources instead. Either way, as I've said before, you'll get a mark record, but the Amazon mark records are not as detailed. Right, and depending on what you're doing that may be all that you need, you don't need like full on like Library of Congress mark records. What's that one under search there? Overcat underneath Library of Congress? Oh yeah, so Overcat is, it's the largest pile of library records besides OCLC. It's every free library records that are pieces of library records that are out there. It's Library of Congress, a huge piece of the British library, the whole German library, a whole bunch of other libraries around the world that have made their records public, and they're all gathered into Overcat, and so it's actually larger than any individual source, but you may want to cut off University of Nebraska if that's what you had. Yeah, nice, I've been, since I'm not dealing directly with OCLC related things anymore, I'm kind of out of touch with some of these cool ways to get mark records. One thing we don't connect to is OCLC because that would be money and rights. You don't want to get connected to that kind of issue, no. Also because they hate us because we fought them, so, yeah. We're recording. So when the, for the patron records, is there, you put all the patron info in there, is there any way for a patron to update their own info in their account? Yeah, I think she showed that you can, yeah, log into there, okay. And you can, as an admin, you can also decide which patron fields in your system they can actually view or edit.  You don't want your fifth graders changing everything but there might be something that you want them to do. That's some basic info, right? Okay, it's one things you'd be updated or whatnot, yeah. Okay, so they do have that kind of ability. And they don't have to, patrons don't have a library thing account themselves, it's just they have an account, and they could if they wanted to. Patrons should not, you can have a link to library thing in your TinyCat library but by default there is no link to library thing, the patron would have no idea library thing was involved in it. And it's your little world, not ours. Yeah, and I should clarify to actually edit your information, you need full circulation mode. Right. Okay, great. But yeah. Does it, whoa, my questions are scrolling here, hang on a sec guys. What about interlibrary loan? Does it support that? There's no specific feature built for that. Yeah, there's no specific feature built for that. That's the end of my comment. There's no feature built for it. If you have an idea of what we should do there, let us know. Go to that library, the discussion group and see if there's somebody talking about it there, yeah. I can imagine that would be something, yeah, it's a whole nother level of stuff that I don't know. There's a lot of things that we could add to this. I think we're trying to, I would rather make it easier than I would make it larger. So, but both are obviously on the table. Oh, one thing you'll notice there is if you don't have a cover, you'll notice that book scrolling by, that one there, we generate fake covers for anything that doesn't have a cover, title author and hard cover. And another thing you just, you get covers, you can, you get covers automatically from Amazon. You can turn those off and only get covers from library thing, which we have some formerly in covers if you like. So yeah. Yeah, with library thing, I've done that myself before when I had a particular edition of a book scanned in my own book cover and uploaded it to my library thing, records that I was using, yeah. The app also has a really nice cover uploader editor. Oh, cool. I did already find it in the app store, by the way, for in the Google Play Store. So, there's my big L on my phone screen already. All right, we do have questions. Okay, here is a question from Emily here. She's actually from UNL Wall Library here. She teaches cataloging classes. She says, I teach cataloging classes and this looks like it would be a good way to give students hands-on experience with an integrated library system. Do you offer trial accounts for educators or is this something you might consider in the future? Or how would that be? Actually, tell me if I'm wrong. I think that's entirely falling under the free go-ahead-and-do-it category. Since you're not a paid, a library paid, yeah, you could totally, yeah. Yeah, if you're signing up as a personal library and you're not actually lending yet, otherwise you would be an all-volunteer like as a classroom teacher. But yeah, go ahead and sign up for TinyCat.  So I don't think we ever made a thing that I'm gonna make a policy right now being the founder of everything. That is completely free, go ahead and do it. Everything has for a long time been on those 22 things. There are 20 things, whatever the things is. Oh yeah, the 20 things, yeah, we did that. And so it's a good way to learn something about cataloging and integrated library systems and yeah, go to town. I think it's, we love to see more of that. The more people that know about us the better and show up on library things talk and talk about it. We love to hear what people think. Emily says, cool, thanks. I'm gonna recommend that to our cataloger here too. She also does some teaching to see if that's something she would have use of or not. Yeah, every year we see a whole raft of people signing up for exactly this thing. I know Simmons used to have all their people make a library thing account before they, before they got into the nitty gritty of mark records they would start with library. Oh cool, yeah, awesome, yeah. It is, like she says, a nice hands-on, free, easy way to just show here's the basics of what a catalog looks like behind the scenes is that having to throw them into the deep end. The problem is you're gonna start with this and then you're gonna be thrown into one of the major ILS systems out there and you're gonna go, oh my God. What did I get myself into? Let's see, I got another question here. It's a long one, so I'm reading through it. I'll just read it here, okay. Is there a way to duplicate the use of a field in the catalog display? I'm thinking of special collection items where it might be useful to put a local note in more than one place in an entry of patron seats. For example, notes about the collection it is in and the location of the special collection and another note that says who donated it or some other detail, for example. So you have more than one type of thing you wanna give information, because there is a local note. Simple answer is no. Well, yeah, there is a local note area. You can obviously set up collections. So what you're thinking about is something where everything that belonged to a certain collection would have an identical local note of some sort. I think, is that what we're talking about? Probably, yeah. No, that's an interesting feature and that's not beyond possibility, but it is not a current feature. Now, are all of these fields searchable when you're looking up something in a catalog? Any ones that you wanna designate as searchable are searchable, yes. Okay. So you may have to play around that local notes field to get all that info in in the one location. Is there a limit to how long that, how much information can be in the local notes? No, I don't think so. Not that I know of, yeah. Might be 64, but if you're putting 64K in that, you're gonna have to do it with your life, yeah. Yeah. So it'd just be a single note for now, yeah. Okay. All right, did I have anything else here? Anybody else have any other extra, any questions? We've got about five minutes left of our hour here. If anyone does want to throw any more questions out to Tim or Christy about this or if you wanna see anything else on here. I say this is, I have to say, this is very cool. I'm glad I finally got you guys on the show. Now, how long ago, I know Taniq had spent out for a couple of years. When did it first debut? Just over a year ago, actually, last April. Just had our sort of party for our first year, yeah. April 2016? Yes. Yeah, okay. Okay, I wasn't sure, because I know I've been hearing about it before then and I've been trying to connect to you guys to have something on about it. I'm glad we finally did. And actually, Folio from Seattle, that was, we're hoping to have someone on from them as well, because Folio itself just seems like a really cool place. I'll have to do a whole separate show on just that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They, by the way, are the only library that is allowed to have, I think they've got like 50,000 volumes that are allowed to, and you can see that even with that, it's quite fast, so. Oh yeah, it looked pretty good to me, even coming through the screen sharing here, absolutely. I've been using everything that I said for a lot. Gosh, I couldn't even remember how long. Does it tell me when I first started using it on there? In fact, you'll get various awards at five and 10 years if you... Ah, I'll have to see. I'll have to check that out. It'll show on your profile page when you've been a member since. Yeah. And I have been very lax in getting any of my current books in there, but I did have, I do have somewhere in a box, one of the old QCAT barcode scanners. Yeah, we still sell those. You still have those? Yes. Okay, if anyone's interested in those. I have so many of those in my attic, please buy some. There are very cool boxes. If you're looking for a barcode scanner, and it's very simple, and you don't want to go to see the box, and it looks like a cat. It's shaped like a little crouching kitty cat. It is perfect for libraries. I used it to scan my books, but now that I have the phone up too, I may have to check out that and see how that works. Actually, I find the QCAT faster. Is it? Okay. Well, it's partially simply because holding your phone and wiggling it around gets tiresome. It's really cool for the first hundred books, and then your on-falls off, so. Yeah, QCAT works pretty much just like a regular scanner, and it's good price, and mine still works, and yeah. You can get to the traditional library once now for under $100, go into eBay or something, so. Sure, yeah, the gun-type style. Yeah, gun-type, yeah. All right, so it doesn't look like anybody typed in any other questions while we were chatting. Well, thank you so much for inviting us on. Yeah. If anyone has any questions, we're easy to reach. Tim at librarything.com. You can find us in a number of other ways. Are you at Christie at librarything.com, right? Yeah, and I'm gonna try to enter it into the chat now. It's Christie, K-R-I-S-T-I.  Yeah, the library thing also works too, yeah. Yeah. Okay, let's see here. All right. Oh, okay, so how do you spell the name of that scanner? It's, oh, it's with a Q-cat, and I'll actually, I can show you. Oh, we do, right. If you go under the More tab, once you're in librarything, there's a little store link here. So we've got this adorable little Q-cat, it's C-B-C-A-T. Yes, yep. And we also sell printed barcodes, if you need, as well. It's, yeah, then you can get them personalized and stuff like that. Oh, I need to get a 10-10. Those are pictures of my child and other children, yes. I have one of the older, I think the red T-shirt there, the kids' classic, I think I have that style. Oh, there's the adult one, yeah. It was from a long time ago. I mean, I get it. Definitely, are you going to ALA? Me, no, I am not. No, last week, well, anyone's going to ALA. Come by the ProQuest booth, send me a tweet. So you're just gonna have the ProQuest when you're not gonna have a separate library thing. Booth, you're just doing the- Not this time, no, because we're doing a lot of stuff with ProQuest now, but we'll definitely be there going to all the events and stuff. And actually, yeah, can you just, we still have a minute or two here, and actually if we go along, that's fine. Can you briefly explain the difference of what's going on with the library thing for libraries to the new? Yeah, sure. Christie, can you quickly find Synthetics Unbound? Yeah, so library thing for libraries is this product that makes your library catalog better. So if you've got CerseiDynex or TripleI, or whoever TLC, library thing for libraries makes it better by adding things like reviews and tags and recommendations. It's like an add-on to your current regular system. That's right, an add-on to your current system, and it kind of makes it better, more social. Yeah, and so if you go to, that's the library thing for libraries. Synthetics Unbound is the next step. We got together with the people at ProQuest, and Synthetics Unbound combines everything that they have traditionally done with everything that we've traditionally done. So you get covers, professional reviews. From them, you get reviews, user reviews, and recommendations from us, and it all comes wrapped up in a beautiful package. Click on the Raven Boys, if you will, there at Hartford Public Library. So this is in a catalog that costs many thousands of dollars, but then library thing and ProQuest have added in all this great detail, like you may also like these books. You'll look inside, reader reviews, shelves, series, and so forth, all wrapped up in a way that integrates with your library catalog and makes it look great. And yeah, if you're interested in that, check out the cute, slightly corny video that's on Synthetics Unbound. And we'd love to talk to you about that, too. Yeah, like the only reason I'm going to ALAs, because this costs real money, whereas Tiny Pat, if you're paying us $10 a month, that's not going to pay for my beer, so. No. Sure, so if you're the, more than 20,000 titles items library and those bigger ones and you're looking for something, this would be the thing for you to investigate. Thank you so much for inviting me. Awesome, all right, yeah. I'm so glad to have you guys on now. Now, I'm re-invited, big rated about using my library thing. I need to take the afternoon and go home and go home and start scanning more of my books. Wonderful. And with the new Android app, you can do it very quickly. Yeah. Thanks a lot, take care. All right, thank you. All right, I'm going to pull back, present your control to my screen now here. Great, so that I can wrap things up, all right. And you should be seeing, there we go, yes. All right, so we have been recording, as I just did say earlier today's show, and this is our Encompass Live website. If you just Google Encompass Live, luckily so far we are the only thing called that in the world yet, so our Encompass Live links will come up first in your search results. And these are upcoming shows, but right underneath them I have a link to the archives, and this is where today's recording will be here. This is from last week's, we had a representation last week of slides, we won't have that today, recording and a collection of links. I will mention anyone who does this kind of thing. We have been using Delicious for years to collect all of our links to websites that have been mentioned in the show, and just recently it has been bought, and will be what they call, they're freezing it, we won't be able to add any more links to it, so this will be changing to something else that we're trying to investigate what to do with our links. But we still have them out there for you guys somehow, we'll see what that ends up looking like. Trying to get all the information about a presentation to you when you go to look at the archives, so you don't have to search it all out for yourself. So that'll be there. Probably later today, maybe tomorrow, you'll all get emails from me, let me know, let you know when it's out there. Tim and Christy, when I have the recording up, I'll let you know too, you can feel free to use it for any of your promotion if you feel, you did a good job today. Thanks so much. You're welcome to do that. So that will be that, and then I hope you join us next week when our topic is feelings are messy, building emotional intelligence in library land. Annika Ramirez is director of our Three Rivers Library System here up in Northeast Nebraska, and she'll do a presentation about how to deal with other people in your related relationships with other people that you work with, specifically in the library world. So definitely sign up for that session and any of our other ones that we have coming up here in the schedule. Also, Encompass Live is on Facebook. We have a link here to our Facebook page, which I've got open over here. So if you are a big user of Facebook, like us and you'll get notifications of like here when I remind everyone to log in today for today's show, when recordings are available, when other episodes are coming up, we'll promote them here on our Facebook page. So if you are a big Facebook user, give us a like over there. Other than that, that wraps it up for this morning show. Thank you very much for attending and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye.


Vinblastine is a powerful anticancer drug derived from the Madagascar periwinkle plant. Traditionally, it was extracted using a laborious process that was expensive and inconsistent. To address this issue, researchers developed a new method using synthetic biology to create a yeast strain capable of producing Vinblastine directly from its precursor molecules. This yeast strain was then used to produce Vinblastine at higher levels than previously possible, making it more accessible and affordable. This article was authored by D. Gao, Ting Feilu, Jutsong Gao, and others.


This is what an alternative government could look like. It's not a marriage made in heaven. The only trouble is they don't like each other and they don't agree with each other. We asked for a group photo with the three leaders. Shearer and Norman agreed. Winston promptly left.


Mark Thornton has a special offer for fans of minor issues, a free copy of Murray Rothbard's famous work, Anatomy of the State. This is a limited time offer, so act fast. Get yours today at Mises.org slash Issues Free. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. Well, this week we learned that famed investor James Channos shut down his hedge fund, and we are looking at markets reaching record highs. Channos specialized in shorting stocks, stocks that he felt were overvalued. What are investors supposed to make of these two seemingly contrasting stories? Should we be bullish with markets, or should we remain bearish because of concerns about the economy? Channos was famous for shorting Enron stock in the early 2000s, making big profits on the stock collapse and failure. Austrians have looked to Channos as a mini hero of some sort because unlike most short sellers who are very secretive in what they do, Channos was bold and very public about his positions on stocks. Austrians, for example, recognized the need for short selling in markets. Channos was very public, often lashing out at companies for their fraudulent accounting behavior. Austrians recognized that short selling is necessary to keep markets quote honest, unquote. And of course, this is all the more important but dangerous in an era when the Federal Reserve is the big elephant in the room. The banning of short selling and the public hatred of short selling goes all the way back to England in 1630 where short selling was outlawed after tulip mania. People back then as people do now often are confused and think that short selling actually causes stocks to crash or whole markets to crash. In reality, most short selling is mere hedging, not betting and is market neutral. In other words, people who are selling stocks short are making their bets with people who are going long or are bullish on those same stocks or markets. There's literally almost no way I can think of where short selling can actually be the cause of a stock or market collapse. People who are fearful of short selling are really tilting at windmills instead of looking at the real cause of market volatility and what you might think of is fraudulent behavior and that is the Federal Reserve. Should we be surprised that channels shut down his short selling hedge fund? The answer is no, short selling is always dangerous and you're likely to lose money, especially when markets are generally headed higher, even if it's just in nominal terms. And no, we shouldn't be surprised because of the generally good advice of not fighting the Fed. The Fed is, after all, the big elephant in the room. It moves nominal numbers, whether it's the price of gasoline and food or whether it's the price of real estate and stock market prices. The Fed has been in more or less a continuous bailout mode at least since the 1990s and that's even worse today. And finally, we shouldn't be surprised about the fund being shut down because markets, after all, are at all-time highs. The NASDAQ stock market is up 15 times since the great financial crisis and is at a record all-time high. The Standard & Poor's 500 index is up way more than five times and is also at a new record high. Short sellers since the great financial crisis have been creamed, devastated, and in this case simply put out of business. Given all that, should we therefore assume that markets are headed forever higher? Well, the answers there are also no. You want to follow the good general market advice of buying low and selling high. So that would mitigate against this idea that markets are headed ever higher. And no, we shouldn't assume that the markets are headed ever higher because the leadership in stock markets has been incredibly narrow. And I'd like to bring some attention to what is called the Magnificent Seven Stocks. These include Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Tesla, Nvidia, which is of course hooked into artificial intelligence chips, and Meta or Facebook. These are the big technology companies that benefit from a low interest environment and have benefited tremendously since the great financial crisis and even before. My own guesstimates, just eyeballing the numbers of these companies and overall performance indicates that they are more than 75% year to date or over the last year. And also, again, my guesstimates are eyeballing the numbers as a share of the market. And in this case, the market being the Standard & Poor's 500 or S&P 500 indicate that those seven stocks now account for more than 30% of the overall value in the S&P 500. The other 493 stocks now make up less than 70% of that overall market, which represents the overall corporate marketplace in the United States. So these seven companies have grown to represent an enormous share. And their share, of course, is at an all-time high, higher than any seven stocks have been in history. And also, we would say that no, this should not lead to the assumption, at least, that markets are headed ever higher. They obviously could go higher still. But I would like to note that the Fed is or seems to be less restrictive in its monetary policy, less hawkish than is typically portrayed in the media. And the Fed is also seemingly more accommodative towards interest rates or more dovish. In other words, just because they've raised interest rates doesn't mean that they're being incredibly hawkish in the interest rate environment than is commonly portrayed in the media. This could actually be a sign, and many stock investors have indicated to me that this is a sign, not of good news for stock markets, but of bad news for stock markets. And I ask you to take that with a high degree of caution. This has been another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at The Mises Institute.


Galactic eviction, does this mean that there are rogue stars found in our Milky Way Galaxy that have been flung out from the insides of our galaxy? This is going to be your space pod for Thursday, March 8th, 2018. Astronomers have made a discovery of the birthplace of stars found in the halo of the Milky Way Galaxy. The halo is the outer region of a galaxy, and astronomers have now found proof that the stars located in this region do indeed originate from the inner disk of the galaxy and were kicked out in this so-called galactic eviction. Astronomers at Max Planck Institute for Astronomy found key evidence that these stars located in the halo of the galaxy truly did originate from the disk, and through an interaction of a dwarf galaxy passing through the disk, it caused these stars to get totally flung out into the outer regions of the Milky Way. They were able to make these measurements based off of oscillations in which these inception caused ripples in the fabric of space, leading to these stars being ejected outward. These oscillations have a crazy name, and that's galactic socemology, which actually theoretically predicted decades ago, and now scientists have evidence for this in the Milky Way's disk. The way scientists found this was through analyzing chemical compositions of these stars and found that they were made up of the same as the stars in the galactic-thin disk, which is the younger part of the Milky Way located in the galactic plane. They analyzed the spectra of 14 stars located in two different halo structures, the triangular mandromeda and the A13 stellar over densities. These two structures lie on complete opposite sides of the Milky Way galaxy, roughly 14,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane. The scientists did this by using the Keck Observatory's high-resolution etchel spectrometer known as high-res, and they found almost identical chemical compositions for these stars with those in the galactic plane, and this showed strong evidence that these stars likely originated in the galactic plane. It's super exciting this seems that this galactic socemology prediction may stand true. Our Milky Way galaxy may be much more complex and dynamic than we had already thought. Future research includes determining the masses and ages of these stars to hone in on the time limits of when this galactic eviction may have taken place. So this research is super exciting because it's really going to answer a lot of unanswered questions about our galaxy and the stars located in the halo that surrounds it. So if you like this video, be sure to check out our video from last week, which is Space 11.09. And be sure to like and subscribe to see more of our videos. Thanks for watching, guys. Bye!