LibraryThing

LibraryThing is an interesting concept and has certainly generated alot of discussion in Cam23 things. Without wanting to upset the creator, I'm not sure about it myself.  I can see that it has potential for those library minded people who want share there own personal libraries and book passions with each other and create an online community, but can't for the life of me think why they would want catalogue records for the items, unless they have a secret librarian streak!

John Wenzler's article on LibraryThing and the library catalogue has some interesting points about its use in conjunction with library catalogues, but I'm not sure why you would want a library catalogue that "could point users to recommended titles in the collection based on the reading habits and descriptions of their fellow patrons".  I realise it gives people choice and for some it may be useful, but I find it annoying that something wants to second guess what I like. Amazon also does this when you purchase items and assumes that just because you bought something, you may want the same thing as other people. 

I have looked at some of the libraries listed using LibraryThing and to be honest can't really say it enhances the library catalogue in any way. The review feature, I can see being useful in a personal sense and maybe for public libraries, if customers want to know what a particular work of fiction is like before taking it out.  But in an academic library I can't see that one student saying "this book was boring" is going to help others if its a set text.  After all we're all different, how objective are people going to be about a bad review? Read it anyway or not? 

The other aspects which may be useful are the tags and book cover images, which allows a more visual method of retrieving books. However, don't we already have a similar features in our library catalogues, as we already have subject descriptors, keywords and book cover images. 

I did try searching LibraryThing to see what it did and was interested to see that upon searching the topic "war", it brought up a tag cloud including "Lord of the rings" and "Harry Potter" as well as holocaust, World war II and civil war.

For small libraries who can't afford a proper library management system it probably does have a valueable use. However I can't see it being useful to our students.