Thing #14: LibraryThing

Loved this activity! LibraryThing is another Web 2.0 tool I've heard about but have never used. In keeping with the tagline of my blog ("3 birds"), I decided to catalog my bird and nature field guides. It gave me a chance to take every book down from my "birdwatching shelf" (a dedicated shelf in my kitchen), clear away the dustballs and reacquaint myself with some old friends. I found a field guide on New Zealand birds that I'd forgotten that I had. And no, saddly I haven't been to New Zealand. My father-in-law went there and brought the field guide back for me. Some day.... New Zealand is supposed to be a birdwatching paradise.

Here's a link to My Library. Sorry, I can't get this to hotlink.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/gwolfson

And here's a picture of one of my field guides, in case you don't get to My Library:



I noticed that Library Thing has a upload link and allows uploads in various formats (XML, etc). I'm thinking about the possibilities of using this at work. One of the things that's most intriguing is the possibility of adding user-defined tags to standard library subjects. In my job as a special librarian, it's clear to me that our users want content defined the way that they search. We have numerous requests to create custom webpages for various user groups, or to duplicate links from our electronic library to a different format that users are more comfortable with. There's a tension between being productive (i.e. not duplicating efforts with multiple views) versus being flexible and responsive to users.

I've read (maybe on the 23 Things website) that OCLC is exploring user-tags. If anyone is using a combination of standard subject classification and user-defined tags in your library catalog, I'd love to hear about it.