Computer and Library Learning (Archived)

  Last month I started looking at social media sites geared to book lovers.  While Goodreads has the largest number of users, Library Thing is also worth a look.  While at just under 1.5 million users, Library Thing cannot claim the same mass appeal as Goodreads, it has nevertheless earned respectability by having been around longer than Goodreads, and because it seems to have a very dedicated audience among librarians, authors and hardcore readers.  Much of this is doubtless due to its accurate and readily accessible information.
 
 Like Goodreads, membership is a simple matter of signing up and developing a virtual collection by adding books.  You can add up to 200 books with a free membership and unlimited additions for $10/year or $25 for life, but so far free works for me.  Unlike Goodreads, you add cataloguing sources as well.  This means your book will have the information found on library catalogues such as publisher, year of publication, number of pages, ISBN and so on.  While Goodreads has much of this as well, it relies on its members to input this.  Library thing imports this data from trusted sources such as Libraries and Archives Canada and the United States Library of Congress (among others).

 A look at its Zeitgeist page will attest to its professional appeal.  This page will tell you that 6,794 members are also authors.  It will also tell you a lot about what its users look for in a book. While it’s always interesting to know what books are most popular in a community, Library thing also lets you know who has the largest virtual collections, what books have been reviewed most, and who has written the most reviews. You can also see what the most popular tags people use the most to describe books and what authors have the most multiple volumes in (on average) in users collections.

  Library Thing is also of particular appeal to librarians and Library users because it catalogues its books using existing library standards. Library Thing imports cataloguing information from The United States Library Of Congress and Library and Archives Canada along with over 600 other libraries around the world.  One benefit of this is that when you are looking at a book record and click the link that says “Local Book Search”  you don’t just get a link to an online vendor but also to local libraries in your area.  You will still have to check our catalogue, but maybe not for long.  In theory, Library Thing is designed to let you know whether or not a library has a book in its collection but this does not seem to be fully operational just yet.

  While Library Thing does rely on traditional library cataloguing, it is also able to accomodate the more recent and less universal folksonomy approach.  In a nutshell, folksonomies (a play on the word taxonomy) is a concept employed by many social cataloguing sites by which description of an item (in our case books) is done not by a single centralized authority.  So instead of all related items falling under one subject heading,(say inline skating) users assign thier own tags (roller blading, rollerblading, bladeing).  The disadvantage of this is that you have to look under each tag (and know all the tags including the misspelled ones) to be sure you’ve found everything you want.  The advantage is that tags allow you to list books according to what is important to you as opposed to the general public.