LibraryThing Thing

I was excited to see this week’s LibraryThing Thing (does that make sense?), because it is a 2.0 tool with which I am unfamiliar. Of course I have heard about it before, but I haven’t taken the time yet to explore it. I really like the ability to search the user-generated tags; I wish I would have known about this when I was working in a public library and had to do reader’s advisory! Signing up for a free account was really easy, and within a couple of minutes I had already added books to my library and joined a group. I decided to do a tag search for chick lit, as that is my favorite genre and I haven’t be able to keep up with it for a while. I found this general tag search useful, but what I really liked were the tagmashes! What a great idea! Most genres have a number of sub-genres, and most people prefer one or two of these sub-genres to other sub-genres. I clicked on “chick lit, travel” and found some books that I might like to read and others that I have already read and enjoyed. Two that I might like to read are Weekend in Paris and When in Rome. Another tagmash that I might use is "chick lit, humor, mystery". I also like how Danbury incorporated the tags into their catalog; again this would be great for reader’s advisory in the public library. I also think it would be useful for students who trying to find books for their research. LCSH usually provides a great start, but I think that user-generated tags would be better understood by college students.

I do use Visual Bookshelf on Facebook, but I usually only update this with books that I am reading. I do not use this to create a catalog of the books I own, but I could see myself doing that with LibraryThing. Overall, I like LibraryThing better than Visual Bookshelf, because I think it gives users a lot more options.

Thanks for reading!