Facebook

For once a 'thing' that I am already quite familiar with. I've been on facebook since June 2007. I know that because that is when I left the UK for 18 months and found it a really useful way to share photos with friends back home. I guess I still use it mostly for this sort of thing, even since I've come back. I send people messages via facebook too, as it is often convenient to do so, although it is rarely as though I do not have their email addresses too. Initially I found it hard to see how a social site between friends could spill over into the commerical/public services world. I guess the principle of sharing information with interested parties does work, if you reduce facebook to this kind of basic definition. I first came across a library using facebook through contact with York Minster Library in early 2009. York Minster currently has 602 friends and uses its page to promote news, invite comment and showcase images from its collections. York Minster Library relies heavily on volunteer support (many of whom are students from the university) and also uses facebook as a way of sending out messages to these people too. This facebook profile seems to work very well and is particularly successful at generating comments and feedback and I suppose, an electronic community.

I wonder whether facebook is offering libraries cheap and easy ways to create something like a website. I'm sure that most libraries which use facebook have websites already, but many of the features are quite similar. Basic information on the library, news, links, enticing images, - even something like a 'number of hits' feature (ie. 602 people like this). Perhaps with facebook, there comes too a sense of belonging and direct communication. Otherwise, I think the danger is that the distinction between 'friends' and 'library' may sometimes become blurred. Mostly, each library needs to decide how appropriate facebook is for its potential users and the tone it wants to set.

LibraryThing14-15

I have been away from my blog and Cam 23 for what seems like a long time (mainly courtesy of the Sussex coast and a family holiday). But now I am back!

Courtesy of Pietro Bellini on Flickr

The last thing I did was create my LibraryThing account and managed to embed a LibraryThing widget in my blog, but had no time to write any comment. I had great fun filling my virtual library with books from my bookshelf. I decided to include everything on the shelf next to my computer, which actually turned out to be an interesting experiment as to how random and unordered those books are. The vast majority of my books are in storage at the moment, so the few that are out, do cover quite a number of unconnected topics. Being the cataloguer that I am, I then had even more fun attaching various tags to my books. Unfortunately, because they were all so different, no two words were used more than once, but I'm sure that would happen if I added a few more books.

The thing which is very noticeable about LibraryThing is how visually pleasing it is as a way of representing a library collection. But as to its real potential value for the librarian/library... There has been an interesting discussion about this on Library Wanderer's blog, with comments from Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing. According to Tim Spalding, LibraryThing is definitely not to be seen as some kind of free, pretty alternative to the library OPAC. Instead, LibraryThing's real advantage lies in its enhancement of existing library systems with features such as, tags, wikis, recommendations, etc. While I am a big fan of the standard unadulterated online catalogue as an accurate reflection of a collection, I can see how adding these kinds of features is helpful in making catalogues more attractive and useful to others. People I've spoken to often come to using a catalogue with an Amazon mind-set and it seems to be me that LibraryThing can be a helpful tool in bridging the gap between the traditional OPAC style and the more consumer driven tools.