Are you book lover or cataloger at heart? Or do you enjoy finding lost and forgotten gems on the shelf to read? Then LibraryThing may be just the tool for you. Developed for booklovers, this online tool allows you to easily create an online catalog of your own. And what makes it even more special is its social networking component – once you’ve entered your books, you get to see everyone else’s via book titles, authors, and the tags you assign to each entry. Add a book to your catalog by just entering the title – it’s so easy that you don’t even need MARC record training to do it – or connect with other users through your similar reading tastes.
Not just for personal collections, schools and libraries have started using LibraryThing as well. Small schools are using LibraryThing to catalog their collections. According to their website, LibraryThing is “exploring relationships with schools and libraries, to offer non-commercially motivated recommendations and other social data.” As a result, they’ve created LibraryThing for Libraries. Libraries can add the LibraryThing widget to their web pages or blogs to recommend books and list new titles, or install a LibraryThing Search box (instructions are here). Being a non-commercial site makes LibraryThing a good option for school and libraries.
There are lots of ways to use LibraryThing. You can even view your books on a virtual shelf.
So why not join the ranks and create your own library online? With over 313,000 registered users (LibraryThing also has group forum for librarians) and 20 million books cataloged, you’re bound to discover something new.
June 3, 2008 at 1:45 am |
Hi. This is the LibraryThing guy. I hope you don’t mind me leaving a correction. Your description of us as “non-commercial” isn’t quite right. LibraryThing is a company, not a non-profit, and therefore commercial. Our recommendations, however, are not commercial in origin. That is, Amazon recommendations—and BN, etc.—base their recommendations on buying histories, and it is widely reported that a recommendation can be bought—that the algorithm can be swayed by a publisher willing to pay for it. LibraryThing bases its recommendations on non-commercial data. We don’t sell books and we don’t have any sales data. So it’s based on who has what books in their personal library, and what they think of them, via tags, ratings, etc.
Anyway, that’s the story. I didn’t want anyone thinking LibraryThing was a non-profit. We’re just a, um, low profit!
June 19, 2008 at 2:13 pm |
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