Thing 13 - LibraryThing

LibraryThing is pretty darn cool. It's tons of fun adding and rating books in your library. I do wish the design and function of the site was a bit more elegant. I found it a bit difficult to find friends, and it took me forever to figure out how to write a review! It's not particularly intuitive in that respect. I also wish you could use the search box in your home page to search for and add books. It doesn't really help me much to search my own library, and I don't anticipate that being a feature I would use all that much even if I had a much larger compilation of books.

As it is I think LibraryThing is a great tool for librarians and staff to use internally. Staff could easily see the books their co-workers are reading and discuss them through the forums. It could be a really useful way to connect with other libraries and book enthusiasts for reader's advisory and book trend purposes. I don't think LibraryThing would be ideal for sharing with the public in it's current state. It could be a bit confusing for patrons who are unfamiliar with the application. I do like the idea of importing the reviews and suggestion features from LibraryThing into our pac. That would give our patron's access to the really helpful features without all the details.

So basically I think LibraryThing is a really nice tool for keeping track of the books you read and own. I also like the community aspect of being able to share books and make recommendations. It could use a little tweaking, but so far so good!

Thing 11, Tagging and Delicious!

I first tried using Delicious 2 or so years ago, and was super confused at first. I used it for a while to archive some favorite websites so I could find them easily when I was away from my own computer. I didn't use it again until recently when a friend of mine moved away, now we have a special Delicious that we can both log into and use to share links. With tags it's super easy to sort and search for links by subject. Because links are basically ranked by how many people tag them, it's really simple to find helpful website on any topic. Tagging a link in Delicious can be just as easy as adding a favorite to your browser. All you have to do is install a Delicious application in Firefox or IE, then all you do is push a button to tag a website.

The thing about tagging / labeling that bugs me is that some sites use commas and some don't. Flickr and delicious don't, but Blogger does. This creates a bit of a learning curve, especially if you're using multiple sites and applications that all tag and label things differently. I think no commas could be standard, with quotation marks for multi word phrases. With delicious you just smush words together or use an underscore if you need more than one in a tag. For example, say you wanted to tag a picture in flickr, a blog post, and a website with the labels hot dogs and chicago. In flickr you would type in; "hot dogs" chicago. In Blogger you would say; hot dogs, chicago. And in Delicious you would write; hotdogs chicago or hot_dogs chicago. Why can't this be standardized?!

Delicious could be a great research tool for Committees. Since many Committees and Task forces are charged to investigate procedures and products used by other libraries and companies, Delicious could be used to organize helpful links. Delicious might also be a great tool for the reference desk. Librarians could create a Delicious account containing helpful for frequent reference topics. For patrons who can't physically make it into the library a compilation of links would be a great resource.