Why We Moved from LibraryThing to Libib

One of the questions I hear most often from new librarians is, “Why did Plumfield switch from LibraryThing to Libib?” Since we once recommended LibraryThing enthusiastically, it’s a fair question—and one worth answering for others building living books libraries.

The short answer is that our library’s needs changed. Here at Plumfield Living Books Library in Denmark, Wisconsin, we needed software that could keep up with the way our families borrow books.

A collector’s catalog and a busy lending library

LibraryThing was built by a collector for collectors, and that helps explain both what we loved about it and why we eventually needed something different. Its catalog builds very detailed book records, with rich, crowdsourced information and room to track the nitty-gritty details that matter to book collectors. That depth also gives LibraryThing remarkable search power.

There is nothing wrong with wanting all that detail. Greta would love to record more of it herself! But our daily work depends on getting books onto the shelves and helping families search for them, find them, reserve them, and check them out. As our lending library grew, the depth we appreciated in LibraryThing was no longer our most pressing need. Reliable circulation was.

Many of our families drive thirty to ninety minutes to visit. Rather than coming every week, they may come every four to six weeks and borrow forty to eighty books at a time. With more than 12,000 books and nearly 120 patron checkout logs, we were asking the system to manage not just a large collection, but a large collection moving steadily among families. Each of the records that LibraryThing creates for each book has enormous data in it. With our heavy traffic and large catalog volume, the software had trouble refreshing the indexing fast enough. Our check out transactions would constantly freeze and fail altogether.

Note: I believe that LibraryThing has since made significant changes to their database since our switch. It may not be an issue any more.

We needed smoother, faster checkout

The problem was more than a slow checkout screen. After trying the system during both quiet and busy library hours and talking with LibraryThing about the failures, we understood that the database’s back-end indexing was struggling with the combination of our catalog and patron checkout records. At our scale, it was coming to a halt.

In practice, individual book records sometimes took two minutes to load in LibraryThing’s lending interface, TinyCat. We would sit waiting for the screen to stop spinning, and sometimes a transaction failed altogether, requiring us to start again. When a family has forty or eighty books to borrow, those delays make checkout a substantial part of their visit.

We needed checkout to work reliably so we could spend our time helping families find books, not waiting for a screen to load. LibraryThing’s detailed catalog remained a strength, but it could not make up for the circulation problems we were experiencing.

Libib better fit our lending needs

Along with faster performance, Libib offered several practical advantages:

• Built-in hold queues. Families can get in line for a popular book without our maintaining a separate spreadsheet.
• Branch management. We can manage branch collections within our larger library system.
• Separate manager accounts and permissions. Branch librarians can have their own logins, with access appropriate to their responsibilities.
• A simpler interface. Both our team and our patrons have found Libib’s cleaner interface easier to use.

These features matter because they support the work we’re actually doing: helping families search for, reserve, and borrow books across a growing library.

That doesn’t mean everyone should switch

There is still much we appreciate about LibraryThing. Its detailed catalog records and powerful searching are real strengths, and TinyCat offered lending settings we liked. Libib was not an upgrade in every respect; it was a better fit for our particular priorities.

If LibraryThing is serving your library well, please don’t read our decision as a recommendation to leave. Moving a catalog is substantial work. Our transition has taken the better part of six months, and we are still finishing it.

For new librarians, our advice is to consider not only the size of your collection but how your library will operate. How many families will visit together? How many books will they borrow? Will you need hold queues, branches, or several people managing circulation?

For Plumfield, dependable checkout and practical lending tools became the deciding factors. We moved to Libib so we could spend less time managing the system and more time serving the families who come through our doors.