Have just discovered Library Thing "an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone—. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth." You can catalogue 100 books for free, with instant sign-up. There is a crude search function of various catalogues, including Library of Congress, National Library of Scotland and Amazon. Only the title is displayed after search, which is irritating when you are trying to pick a specific edition. The display options of the bibliographic and other details are also limited to 7 elements. You can add tags and reviews. You can also see who else catalogued this book, and what other books are tagged like this one. It appears already to have a good number of users.Am trying to think whether this can be tied to information literacy ..... in that it's social, and on the web, it could perhaps help people to understand how catalogues work, by creating their own. There is some clunkiness (e.g. the first set of tags on my trial book disappeared), admittedly the service is in beta.
Actually it's mostly the idea of non-librarians doing derived cataloguing (I even saw a reference to the MARC format somewhere on the site - though Library Thing wasn't created by a librarian) which I find a little mind-blowing. Although, from the "author cloud", where Pratchett, Tolkein, Rowling etc feature in very large letters, the users are probably not representative of the entire population (in fact I probably fit in pretty well to this nerd/ bookish/ librarian profile). Website is at http://www.librarything.com/
Phot by Sheila Webber: Shark egg case, shore, Port Julia, South Australia June 2006.
2 comments:
Hey. Thanks for mentioning LibraryThing!
Some quick notes/corrections:
1. RE: "Only the title is displayed after search, which is irritating when you are trying to pick a specific edition." If you click on the little black arrow when adding books you can get more info, like publisher, date, ISBN, etc.
2. RE: "The display options of the bibliographic and other details are also limited to 7 elements." LibraryThing does not display only seven fields. Those are just the ones on the default display. Many more—including LC Call Nos., LCSH, Dewey, language data, etc.—are available.
3. LibraryThing runs on Amazon Web Services and MARC records from ~45 libraries. The "authority files" run on user-assisted disambiguation (rather than, for example, FRBR). This is the real "everyone is a librarian" element. It turns out regular people can do this stuff. Indeed, now and then (such as the blindingly complex world of works by Isaac Asimov), regular people and "fans" offer knowledge catalogers do not.
4. Although not created by a librarian, a librarian, Abigail Blachly, a recent Simmons grad, was the first hire.
Sorry about the clunkiness. We're working on it day and night...
Thanks for dropping by, Tim, and for the useful hints. Re no 2, I could see that there were lots of nice data elements to chose from, but I didn't see how you could have more than 7 selected for any given item.
Sheila
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