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[edit] How do I edit my profile?

Click Edit profile/account settings.

[edit] What are Connections?

LibraryThing has several different ways of letting you connect with other members.

• You can add someone as your friend. They will be sent a message asking them to approve the "friendship". This will add their name to your list, and yours to theirs—it's mutual.
• You can add someone to your "interesting libraries" list. This adds a link to them on your profile page without requiring confirmation (although they will be notified). It's a good way to call out or make note of interesting members and their libraries (without necessarily claiming "friendship" with them).
• You can add someone to your private watch list. This is a private list, visible only to you. No one else can see who is on it.
• LibraryThing automatically generates a list of authors from your library who have created a LibraryThing Author account.

[edit] How do I add people to my Connections?

You can add other users to your "interesting libraries", friends, or private contact list by clicking the appropriate add link on the upper right of their profile page.

[edit] What's Connections News?

Connections News lets you see recently added books, ratings, and reviews from members on your Connections lists, as well as from members with similar libraries to yours.

[edit] What do those obscurity numbers in my fun statistics page mean?

The book obscurity number measures how many people have your books. Basically, the lower your numbers are, the more obscure your collection is.

Take a given book - Guns, Germs, and Steel, for example. That book has 1,355 members who list it in their library. If you had only one book in your library, and that book was Guns, Germs, and Steel, your book obscurity would be 1,355 mean and 1,355 median.

Most of the time, however, you have more than one book. In that case, it provides an AVERAGE number. The most familiar type of average is the 'mean'. So, if you have the following three books in your library: Guns, Germs, and Steel (1,355 members), Save Me the Waltz (17 members), and Maori Myth and Legend (4 members), your mean book obscurity is 1,355 + 17 + 4 divided by 3. This is 458.7.

'Median' is a way of doing an average that works a little differently. The mean of 458.7 seems a little wrong, skewed high by that one really popular book. A median, by contrast, looks at the middle number in the set - in this case, 17. So the obscurity number would show up as "17/458.7 Median/mean book obscurity".

[edit] Why are books I share with one other member labeled "you and none other"? Shouldn't they be "you and one other"?

This heading is from the French phrase Vous et nul autre, commonly used on poesy rings. The 'you' refers to the person with whom you share the book; the best way to think of it is probably "(I share this book with) you and none other".

If you want a list of books that are unique to your library, click on the blue heading of the "Shared" column in your catalog to sort by your most-shared books, then click again to bring your least-shared books to the top.

[edit] What's the 'also on' section for, and how do I add to it?

"Also on" provides links to your profile on other websites. You can add to your "also on" list by clicking Edit profile/account settings. See a complete list of the sites included in "Also on", and information on where to find your "handle" for each site: Also on.

You can also explore your Also on connections, which finds your friends and contacts from other sites, and tells you whether or not they are also members of LibraryThing.

[edit] How do I put links in the text on my profile page?

If you type (for example)

My favourite book is <a href="http:http://www.librarything.com/author/hessehermann.

It will show up like this:

My favourite book is Little Women.

You can also format your text by adding <b>bold</b> or <i>italics</i> tags around your text.

[edit] How do I put images in the text on my profile page?

You can combine links and images on your profile page.

When you are on a work page (say, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) you can right-click on the picture and choose (Firefox) "Copy Image Location" or (Internet Explorer) "Properties" then highlight the URL address and right-click again to "Copy" the address of the picture.

Then you can type a line similar to the following into your profile:

<img src="http://www.librarything.com//picsizes/b9/8c/b833705c88dc2c69b67f902656549363.jpg">

and you should see

You can make the cover a hyperlink by combining the image with a link

<a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/book/18657844"><img src="http://www.librarything.com//picsizes/b9/8c/b833705c88dc2c69b67f902656549363.jpg"></a>

Due to security settings on this wiki, creating an image that links to a URL is not permitted, so there is no example. It works in your profile, though!