LibraryThing

Before I used LibraryThing, I was very curious to know how it worked. How user-friendly was the access mechanism? How much information about the book did I have to input? How useful would this tool really be for a library with an OPAC?

A quick tour left me pleasantly surprised. First of all, for well-known books, there was little or no effort involved in adding them to my collection. I simply typed in a keyword phrase (either title or author), scanned through the hits/results and selected the book I wanted. Easy as pie!!

Upon selecting the title, I was given the option to add my own personal tags so that I could create my own unique subject areas.

For those books that did not appear in LibraryThing, I had the option of adding the book manually. This process was also very quick and required very little information beyond the title, author, date, and publisher. What I liked about this option was that it enabled you to add URLs for book reviews or interject your own comments. When adding books in this manner, I used the "comments" field more like a "description" field in which I offered additional descriptive information about the title.

After my collection was built, I had the ability to view other folks who had the same titles in their libraries. I found this option to be pretty cool, but my username was often listed multiple times as if there was more than one user with the name: "digitizationdiva". I suspect this is a small bug that they're working out.

In terms of access, I can view my library collection in either the "title" view or the "cover" view. If I had lots of books with lovely covers, the latter view would really help simulate the feeling of browsing a bookshelf.

Finally, I played with the LibraryThing widgets that allowed users to post their library collections on a web site or blog. The versatility of these widgets are truly amazing. You can display info about your LibraryThing collection grouped by titles, covers, most recently added books, tags, or simply display random titles. I have chosen to add the widget that displays my most commonly tagged titles.

I suppose now that I've gotten to the very end of my post, I should explain what my LibraryThing Collection contains.

I have listed all the books and conference proceedings that I keep on my bookshelves as reference sources for my work. These cover the topics of digitization, digital preservation, metadata, digital libraries, and general cataloging info. I hope this collection will be useful for folks internally within the library who may want to borrow some of these materials for their own uses.

This is just one possible use of LibraryThing: to list library staff-only copies of books and publications so that those titles can be shared among staff who might not otherwise know that their colleague owns them.