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Tim Spalding 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Tim Spalding 🇺🇦
@librarythingtim
@LibraryThing founder. Father, hacker, bibliophile, ex-classicist, Mainer, Catholic. I tweet books, libraries, technology, culture. Married to @LisaCareyWrites.
Oct 27, 2023 • 15 tweets • 7 min read
Here's my case that Talpa () will change book and library search forever, based on a talk I gave for @SirsiDynix Connections. I also explain how Talpa works. 🧵

Remember that guy searching for a six-fingered man? Talpa.ai
Image Talpa lets' you type in "story with six-fingered man" and you get the answer… The Princess Bridge, book and movie. Image
Mar 1, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Trying to think if there are any applications for this on LibraryThing and in the book space. ChatGPT is bad at book recommendations—even without it hallucinating non-existent books! It is not smart. But, as someone put it, "What can I do with unlimited stupid people?" I fed ChatGPT tag clouds for four books and asked it to tell me what the books were. It got 3/4 right (Fahrenheit 451—correct, We—correct, The Mermaids Chair—incorrect, Reading in the Dark—correct.) Is this useful? No. But it's interesting.
Dec 3, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I'm all for diverse literature, but please don't put Homer in the "nondiverse" category. A 2700 year-old oral poem from an illiterate, non-Christian, pre-philosophy, shame-based culture is more deeply alien to a high school student's experience than anything else they will read. "We've replaced Homer with a young adult novel about a contemporary Mexican-American teenager to ensure kids encounter different cultures and experiences!"
Jul 16, 2021 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
1/ A quick explainer on Latin in the Catholic church for people who love Latin. First, the Pope did not outlaw the Latin mass. The base text of the mass is still in Latin, and it remains the go-to whenever Catholics from different languages get together (e.g., at the Vatican!) 2/ What he's downplaying is the *OLD* pre-60s mass, which could ONLY be said in Latin. That's fine because Latin is not and never was THE Catholic language. Rather, Latin was chosen for western Europe, and it got "stuck." What languages are Catholic?
Jul 16, 2021 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
1/ A explainer thread on the larger context of this move, for non-Catholics and ordinary Catholics. TLDR: It has nothing to do with Latin per se, and everything to do halting the growth of divisive "traditionalist" groups who've become a hostile "alternative" Catholic church. 🧵 2/ In 1960-1964 the Catholic church held a major worldwide meeting, or "council." Councils are how the church works through big things and changes with the times. If you've ever said the "Nicene Creed," as most Christians do, that was the work of the first council.
Jul 15, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
1/ Libraries should not be able to buy a single physical copy and then loan out digital copies serially to anyone, anywhere, forever. That's a gross distortion of copyright—literally, the right to make copies—and if libraries push for it, courts and Congress will stop them. 2/ If Congress steps in, that will be a dangerous moment for libraries. The right of "first sale," which allows libraries—and *any* owner of a book or other physical item—to lend it out, has never been up for legislative review.
Jul 15, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
LibraryThing feature, Dewey friends, make visible the glittering threads I imagine running between far-flung books in the library. For example, there are connections between 10X (most Philosophy) and 501 (Philosophy of Science), or 225 (New Testament) and 487.4 (Koine Greek). I'm now doing this for LC Classification and it brings me back to studying classics at Georgetown and UMich, where I knew every book in the DFs (Greek History) and the PAs (Greek literature, incl. the historians). I bet ancient history isn't the only discipline split like that.
Jul 3, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Has anyone in indie bookstores done an analysis of this? It is not what indies would want, that's for sure. Americans love Amazon. And the love is strongest among some of the core indie demographics—college-educated, well-off, urbanite, Democratic. Someone is going to jump on me over these generalizations. If so, I'll run indie bookstore ZIP codes against the standard databases and we can see who's right. (But note that white Americans are cooler on Amazon than non-whites; I suspect indie demographics tilt white.)
Feb 12, 2021 • 17 tweets • 7 min read
I recently did some digging into right-wing activist @AbbyJohnson's account of herself at the Capitol riots. I asked if anyone had more evidence, and a follower sent me second video with Johnson. It undermines her efforts to downplay her engagement. projects.propublica.org/parler-capitol… (Johnson drew controversy over an invitation to speak at Catholic U. Many opposed her for comments about COVID, racial profiling, and being at the riot. She ended up getting dropped by the Pro-Life club, but picked up by the Republicans.) americamagazine.org/politics-socie…
Feb 10, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The "do audiobooks count as reading?" thing strange. I'm a huge audiobook reader and I see no case against them. But what is this about, exactly? Are you under the impression you're going to get a free pizza if you read enough books? FWIW, I think simple equivalence isn't right. I remember fiction books I've read in audio *better*; it's like being read to as a child. But it tends to slightly impair my grasp of non-fiction insofar as the structure of the argument is clearer when you see the chapters laid out.
Jan 8, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I haven't enjoyed user-generated content as much since all those guitar version of Pachelbel more than a decade ago. tiktok.com/music/original… The social web is a never-ending struggle between the much-increased collaborative potential of dark and light forces—of Nazis and pedophiles, or sea-shanty singers and book lovers. The goal of social-software developers like myself is to design systems that favor the latter.
Sep 2, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Coronavirus derangement has a high evangelical quotient, but here's a Catholic priest instucting his flock not to wear a mask. Bonus points for a specifically Catholic issue—"Disobey your bishop." We don't have a good vocabulary for such people. He's not stupid. He's not uneducated. He's not crazy. He's not "brainwashed" in the traditional sense. He's immoral, but not consciously so; that is, if you believed what the believes, you'd oppose masks too.

Belief-broken?
Mar 7, 2020 • 18 tweets • 2 min read
Okay, I haven't seen enough public-library coronavirus problem solving on social media, so I'm going to start a thread of ideas. Contribute your own votes, please!

1. Redistribute a significant percent of this year's collections budget to ebooks and other digital resources? 2. Significantly change renewals or return dates, so people can keep stuff out much longer?
Nov 18, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
1/ My Catholic church is getting rid of it’s library. They say nobody uses it, but it was hidden away and never updated—lots of post-Vatican II titles with balloon-writing covers, no children’s books. 2/ So I’m fighting back. I’m going to buy a book cart—just one first—and fill it with new titles, children’s books, books in French (the Parish is half Central African). That way we can wheel it out and it won’t be hidden.