Do something with quotations

I occasionally come across a good quote in a book I'm reading. I may enter it into CK. And then it disappears into a black hole, never to be thought of again.

At the very least, I'd like a way to mark ("favourite"?) quotes that I like, so that I can easily find them again. It would be nice if we could see other people's favourite quotes too. If we're being ambitious, I'd also like to see thumbs up and down on quotes, sorting them like the Member Recommendations are sorted, and a homepage module highlighting new or popular quotes, and maybe even a trivia game.

I also think there should be multiple short-form CK modules on the work pages, so that we can split off the information that we care about and display it more prominently.

I know, not a priority. But it doesn't hurt to mention it.

I agree more than you know. I think it should be a cornerstone of a general social annotations feature.

How would general social annotations work? It sounds interesting, but I can't quite picture what the mechanism would be. Comments attached to quotes?

Anyway, I hope you'll go ahead with the whole thing eventually.

Marginalia.

LibraryThing was originally going to be "Marginalian." (Insert cute alien-face logo here.) The cataloging idea came about once I realized I needed cataloging to hang the marginalia on.

Right, but how do we attach marginalia to a work when we don't have the text? Edition-specific page references? Quotations? Both?

I remember hearing you talk about marginalia in the past, but I've never quite understood how it would work.

I remember hearing about work in the past, but I've never quite understood it.

Page numbers, fundamentally. Haven't you ever kept a work document with your thoughts on a passage.

Obviously it's much easier when you make notes on a Kindle or whatever. Except TAKING those notes is currently something of a pain.

Sure, but I often precede my comments with quotations even for myself. Comments without context are less interesting, and I can't imagine that most LT users would actually have a copy of the book in front of them when looking at someone else's annotations. I guess I'll just have to see how it turns out.

Remember that thread a while back where we put fake money toward different feature priorities? I would throw 100% behind the development of a robust quotation manager. I've looked for software to do this for ages and found nothing satisfactory. I've kept sprawling txt documents so I could find the right quote by searching when needed, but that gets awkward. Besides, quotation data belongs with my books right here.

_Zoe_, I really like your idea of socializing quotes—I've never thought of that before. I'd be thrilled with just a text field for the quote, a link to a work along with a page number for the source, and a tag field so I can search and find the right quote in the future. One more thought—a quotation widget would do a lot to spread LT's name around.

For now, my favourite quotes remain on paper (with a circled star in the margin). If (when?) LT makes a move with social annotations, I'll spend hours shuffling through my books making those pencil annotations usable.

Oh, tags! I love the idea of tagging quotes.

7) No, I have never kept notes on a work document.

If tags were deployed for quotations, I suggest that a 'nudge' to encourage tagging would be very helpful -- similar to the Cover Game created to encourage tagging of covers.

I'm thinking of a Home page module to display quotes (a) entered or "selected" by user, (b) from user's books but not specifically entered / selected, (c) from books not in user's catalogue (but perhaps limited by Talk group, favourite authors, etc).

Just seeing new quotes would be enough to inspire me to add a tag or two.

(Full disclosure: previously suggested at http://www.librarything.com/topic/93446#2041765)

Imagine how powerful it would be if you could search for tag like "pride" or "joy" and find not only your own, but ever other user's entered quotes. Add thumbs as suggested above, and they would rank themselves in terms of impact.

>12 elenchus: Sounds good to me.

>13 StephenBarkley: Yup, that would be fabulous.

Super idea, Zoe. I would love this.

>15 thebeadden: Thanks :)

I wonder whether it would be better to split Quotations off from CK entirely, and build a separate feature like we have for Member Recommendations.

> 16 I agree, split it off from CK entirely. I am excited just thinking about it. So, how long until you can get Tim to do it? ;)

I'd estimate two weeks :D

There could also be a helper badge for quote-tagging, to give some added incentive.

We can't be the only people who would love this. I hope that everyone who would chimes in here. Keep this post at the top of the forum.

> I hope so! If anyone can do it, you can. :)

I'm lukewarm, but I'm not against it.

(As long as I can opt-out :-P)

It's not a bad idea. Separate feature and badge would both help it too. --Kim

16 & 17> Yep, I think a quote manager needs to be separated from CK. It's too important (at least in my mind) to be buried there.

Both a quotation feature and a marginalia feature sound very good to me. Though nothing will replace my book darts and mechanical pencil.

And if you combine them... I can just see it, whole books being refuted on LT by groups of readers. You'll need rules so we can prevent quoting so much of a book that it violates copyright.

Now I'm having a wild thought about a community effort to annotate public domain works. You know, give people who read Project Gutenberg texts a way of knowing what some deceptively familiar word did and did not mean in the 16th century or the 19th. Shut up, brain, you're making me dizzy.

Agreed with _Zoe_ 1 about the CK 'black hole'. Part of my review process is to type up my notes after a read, capturing the quotes in a document, and then entering selected quotes in CK at the time I post my review. And then lose all track of the favorites. Which book was that in?! Great feature request, _Zoe_! Add my 'vote'.

This would be a great feature!

In response to #7, I never used to take notes until I bought a kindle. That works well except when Amazon (kindly) offers to replace the book with a new version -- usually correcting typos and other formatting issues. If you accept, your notes will no longer link to the new copy of the book. If I had them in LT, I wouldn't lose them. Of course, I would end up writing notes twice -- once in the book itself and once in LT, but probably no way around that...?

k4k

Bump.

Tim, let's revive marginalia!

I just posted about readmill (see https://www.librarything.com/topic/172858) which apparently was a social marginalia / annotations reading app. I'd never known about it, but it existed, and now it's going away.

Bump.

noted!

okay, UPDATE: lorannen helped me prioritize the overall RSI list a couple of weeks ago, so the next step is to go over this list with Tim and the other developers to get a feel for what can happen and when. Since we've got a big feature being released in the next few weeks, that has taken the front seat and I'm looking to be able to make more progress on this afterwards! I'll try to get updates out to the RSI's that we know are either deferred, or not likely to happen for awhile (with as much explanation as possible), before I leave the country next Friday (just until July 5th). If you have questions about any specific RSI, you can always message me on my profile or email me at kristi@librarything.com (just don't abuse me :).

Thanks!

I appreciate this approach to prioritising efforts and helping share the decisions with us!

I'm glad to hear that progress is being made!

>32 elenchus: and >33 _Zoe_: awesome, thanks! I'm driving this project as much as I can, so thanks for being patient. I *am* dedicated to keeping the momentum (however fast or slow) going for these!

Thank you!

My UPDATE on this RSI: we're marking this RSI as "yellow" in our list, or "up for discussion." See my color scheme for marking RSI's below.

This recommendation, which originates as quotes but is also morphed alongside the whole Marginalia concept, is something that we obviously know Tim is on board with, but it will be a big project to do it right. In reality, the RSI is probably closer to being deferred, but we'd like to get Tim's current thoughts on it. I'll report back once we do! Thanks.

RSI Color Scheme:
Green = Go! Let's get this up ASAP.
Yellow = Up for discussion. Need to discuss if/how it can be implemented or if it needs to be deferred.
Red = Deferred. May (or may not) be worthwhile (we'll note as such), but it's not going to be considered anytime soon. Bump within another year or so.

Like this additional update process, with color coding.

I'd like more nuance in the shading, should I lodge an RSI for that?

I like the colour coding, though I agree with bernsad that some more nuance might be nice, especially between "deferred but would like to consider in future" and "we never want to do this".

And of course, I'd like to see the statuses implemented as a feature like the bug tracker.

As for this actual feature, I think quotes could be implemented without the whole marginalia apparatus. When more basic features end up being taken as parts of enormous features, the whole thing often ends up only halfway implemented anyway, and half the time the core feature is not among the half that gets implemented.

>39 _Zoe_: Psst, I was trying to be funny about the shading. Damn I hate having to explain my jokes; happens all the time. :(

>40 bernsad: Well, I understood that the part about lodging an RSI was intended to be funny :P

I'm waiting for something to happen on this topic almost as eagerly as I waited for Brandon Sanderson to finish off Jordan's Wheel of Time!

>38 bernsad: snort. let's call that one "yellow" for now ;)

>39 _Zoe_: love your comments. I'll make a point to report back with more specific determinations after we've met with Tim directly about these, as far as discerning between the "deferred" and "never happening" (and just more specifics in general).

(Nice plug for the bug tracker. :) )

Thank you for listening! :D

This is my single most desired feature on LT. I'm adding quotes to comments currently to have them on LT, but what I really need is a taggable independent module that would enable pulling all quotes by work, author and/or tags.

>26 krazy4katz: When in kindle making note of a quote, I email using kindle share to my standard email account. The title, series, and author are included in the email. If I want to remember anything else, I edit the email and send it.
When I open my email, I can copy and insert it into LT and/or a spreadsheet.

>49 PlaidStallion: I was responding to >26 krazy4katz: remark that she wanted to keep in both kindle AND LT. She was concerned about having to type the quote twice.

I was trying to offer a way to prevent typing same quote twice.