Friday, February 15, 2008

Thing 14 - LibraryThing

I discovered LibraryThing last summer when I was working on organizing my church library. I was starting from scratch, looking for cheap cataloging software, and the first link on Google was LibraryThing. I could hardly believe it. I have about 400 books in the church library (I've got 335 books cataloged).

I led an adult forum at my church on the library early this fall, and explained to the folks who came to the class that about 10 years ago, when our schools began automating, we paid almost $10,000 to use a Union Catalog, which had around a 80% hit rate. This summer, I paid $25 for the same kind of service - and have an almost perfect hit rate. It's rare when Amazon doesn't have a book entry, but having access to the Library of Congress has enabled me to find some really obscure titles. This really is an amazing service.

Tagging books on Library Thing can be challenging because it's wide-open for interpretation. I tend to use the subject guides on Amazon, and have had some luck with the CIP's in books. I opted to shelve books by topics, rather than by Dewey. It makes more sense for a church library, where people are usually looking for specific topics, and the Dewey range is pretty crowded around the 200s.

This summer, the LibraryThing crew was making some adjustments to their servers and the service would be slow or unavailable at times. I haven't had any problems with it for months and I've noticed many enhancements. I just can't say enough good things about LibraryThing. It's perfect for personal collections, and church libraries. I'd love to be able to use it to advertise new acquisitions at the school, but I haven't been able to figure out how to import lists from Follett yet.

The Brainerd UCC church's library widget:

And just because I love tag clouds:

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