Library Thing-ing

I love the idea of LibraryThing - lots of people sharing what they love to read in a giant community is a brilliant way of creating connections between books, highlighting trends in reading habits as well as being an excellent illustration of what people are actually read. I have used the site before as I started to catalogue my own books a while back to stop myself buying multiple copies of things - although I clearly don't have the commitment as I only managed to add a bookshelf or so last time.

Things like the 'tbr' (to be read) tag reveal surprises about current reading habits - Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrelll is the top book waiting to be read on LibraryThing - beating War and Peace by a long way which surprised me (although actually I've given up on both). This could of course be because LibraryThing is based on books owned more than books read - so people list unread books on their shelves rather than all time ambitious tbr books. As a borrower from libraries I was relieved to find you can list books as 'read but unowned'. The whole point of creating a list of books for me would be to show your personal reading habits and history, rather than just a history of my impulse buys in Waterstones 3 for 2!


  

Using LibraryThing within libraries is of course a completely different matter. LibraryThing is not designed to be a library catalogue for institutions, the focus is more on personal libraries  - although the advantages of such a low cost, easy access cataloguing system for small libraries who can't afford other software are obvious.

I was very interested in looking at the features of LibraryThing for Libraries on the High Plains Library District catalogue. This offers some of the key Web 2.0 features of LibraryThing as an addition to a full library catalogue. I can really see the benefits of this for public libraries. The user created reviews, tags etc make it feel a lot more friendly and interesting. I'm not sure how useful it would be for academic libraries where users are often after specific books for specific research or subjects rather than browsing and reading for pleasure -although this obviously does happen in academic libraries too!