W7-8 LibraryThing

Welcome to Week 7 of krl2pt0 — LibraryThing

 

“It’s your thing

do what you wanna do.”

-Isley Brothers

librarything

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Get Your Groove with LibraryThing

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Visit LibraryThing and create your own virtual library. With a free account, users can catalog up to 200 books or pay a minimal fee for unlimited cataloging. Opening an account is easy. Just create a login and a password. “Voila!” You now have your very own library to catalog as you please.

For each book you enter, LibraryThing searches the Library of Congress, Amazon and 80 world libraries for reviews. As a user, you select the review and LibraryThing will add to your website.

Currently, LibraryThing has approximately 200,000 users cataloguing 13 million books with 18 million tags. Tags are the magic component of the virtual library website. Users can tag their own books with common keywords, thus providing more choices for searching.

Ready? You can jump right in or check out some additional info from these sources first:

After opening an account, create a profile and start cataloguing your collection. Users can make their libraries private or public, invite friends to join, share personal information, and add images. Try adding an avatar from Meez.com . You can even add a link to your personal blog.

Okay, now you are ready to create your own library. You can search for books to add by title, author or ISBN. At this point, you can also add tags or edit the information LibraryThing provides about your book. LibraryThing will return a list of reviews on the right of the screen. Select the review you want, tag your book and your book is now catalogued. You can also write your own review.

angled bookshelfLibraryThing provides several choices to display your books. You can can change the display with a single keystroke. Choices include covers of books face out or books listed vertically.

Besides personal users, public libraries are also cashing in on LibraryThing. Last spring Dansbury Public Library, CT., was the first public library to add a LibraryThing widget to their catalog giving their patrons more options for research and reader’s advisory. (See the Library Journal article under “Additional Resources” for more information).

As with Flickr, you can make your collection public, or keep it entirely private. Unfortunately, it’s an either/or choice — you can’t make some selections public and others private, or share your catalog only with selected viewers.

Here are some of the features to explore in LibraryThing:

  • “Members with your books” — shows the 50 libraries of other users most similar to yours
  • Social networking — you can add another user as a friend, add them to your private watch list, or add them as an “interesting library”
  • You can create a tag cloud of your favorite authors
  • Add your own reviews of your books
  • Recommendations — generated by LibraryThing (based on your collection) or from other users
  • Add LibraryThing to your blog
  • Talk and Groups

For those of you that use Firefox as your web browser, there is a plug-in you can add to your LibraryThing page that will show you a list of libraries that have a book you have selected in their holdings. To see more about this, check out LibraryThing Thing.

Additional resources:

Other virtual library websites:

Assignments for Week 7:

  1. Create an account at LibraryThing
  2. Catalog and tag at least three books
  3. Write about your impressions of LibraryThing in your blog.
  4. Add the URL of your blog post to the Tracking Log

Finally — click here and give yourself a hand!

“Extra” for Week 7:

  • Add the LibraryThing widget to your blog, or a link to your LibraryThing account, and share your catalog.
    1. Go here for info on using the widget.
    2. To add a link, use this code in your blog post or sidebar: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/username — where username is your account UN in LibraryThing )

Now do your “thing” by creating your own personal library!

www.librarything.com


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5 Responses

  1. Enjoyed the creativity of your adding the “before and after” music to our directions– fun!

  2. Now this is something I could get excited about!

  3. Just a general question….I have not been able to cut and paste info into the tracking log for several assignments now….any insight into what I’m doing wrong? I was able to cut/paste my LibraryThing info into my blog,so…what gives?

  4. I just tested it and it worked fine, but I know others have occasionally had the same experience you did.

    It isn’t anything you are doing wrong.
    Because the Tracking Log is a web-based document, sometimes a heavy volume of web traffic will jam it up, just like a website will sometimes not load, or load very slowly.

    I’ll try hitting the “Refresh” button, and that will usually clear it out. If that doesn’t work, if you wait 10 min. or so, it should usually be OK.

    bc

  5. Thanks, Bob. I did get the bright idea to try to refresh the page, to no avail. FYI, I was trying to do this from my home computer, not a krl computer. I’ll see how it works out next time I try it.

    msg

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