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.
