LibraryThing

My own (not so) private Library

LibraryThing was very easy to set up and fun to add titles. I hadn't heard of it before Cam23 so I found some of the links which Kirsty encouraged us to read quite interesting. For example, the Social networking for Bookworms article suggests that LibraryThing can "connect likeminded readers - a sort of MySpace for bookworms", with the emphasis on finding more books and "not to kindle online relationships or cliques". Tagging is of course a strong element of many Web 2.0 technologies & LibraryThing is no exception, with librarians tagging their own books to "create indexes far more vibrant than anything the Library of Congress could handle".

Here's a screen shot of my profile page:


And here is the list of books I have added so far...

Use for Libraries?
I've had a look at those libraries which already use LibraryThing (Central Science & Nuffield College), but I'm not sure if it's for us at the moment. Here at Education we use CamTools to list books from reading lists or titles which have recently been added to stock. These lists include pictures of the front cover, plus a link to Newton to check if the book is available.

By the way, I liked a couple of the quotes from What do Librarians do? - "Information Ninja" & "I'm what Google wants to be when it grows up" are ones I would like to add to my name badge for the new academic year!!

Delicious

I've had a look at how the Judge Business School and the Casimir Lewy Library are using Delicious and it may have potential for some resources we currently have listed on our 24hr Library pages. Tags would be useful to help readers find information in a particular area (see the tag cloud at Thunder Bay Public Library). In one of the items for further reading which Emma suggested, Tags help make libraries Delicious, I read an interesting comment:

“If our web-savvy users notice [that the library] is using del.icio.us...our hope is that they will recognize our position in the community as information providers, visit our web site, work with our virtual collection, and become engaged library users.”

At Education we continually try to think of different ways to present information so that our readers will find it easy to access what they need for their assignments. Which is why we currently use CamTools as a platform for all our resources because of it's flexibility and we are able to make immediate changes to information available on wikis.

I created a personal account a while ago just to familiarise myself with what Delicious does. I'll now look into creating a Library account to bookmark those sites which may be relevant to Education students and link it to our web pages and CamTools sites.

Tags & tagging

Review & retag

I have now reviewed all tags in my blogs and added a lot more which will hopefully describe the contents a bit better.

The Ann Arbor District Library uses tags within its library catalogue and I wonder how helpful users find these? With Aquabrowser, there will be Word Clouds available for each record which will encourage readers to explore other records and broaden their search. Will the Word Cloud have the same role as tags?

An interesting statement in the BBC link which Emma offered as further reading said that adding tags "is a classic example of how the web is enabling the bottom-up building of categories rather than having such things imposed on users." As Librarians we are used to working with controlled vocabulary when cataloguing material, but by adding and using tags in blogs, delicious, etc, we are suggesting, through our own personal preferences, how an item should be categorised. Tagging can be quite a powerful tool...