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.