I just love this thing! Perhaps, because I have an interest in catalogue, indexing and a good personal collection of books. I had heard good things about LibraryThing, and the opportunity to try it out initially came when I was doing some research on catalogues for a friend last October. I was impressed, and determined to come back and explore it more later. 23 things has allowed me to do this. I now have eighteen books in my library, ones that I have really enjoyed, such as Bryce Courtenay’s Four Fires, and ones that I have been wanting to read for ages, but haven’t yet, such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (I know, shock horror!) Of course, I hope to have time to add more. You’ll notice I have a leaning towards Australian authors’ too. I have embedded an LT widget into the blog. Another triumph for me!
LT is great because it does a lot of the hard work for you. You can enter details of a book manually if you want, or do a search within Amazon, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Australia or 252 other sources/catalogues to find item information and populate a record . You can choose to add your own personal tags to describe the book, give it a rating and review it. You can see who has recently added the book to their collection, see other’s reviews of it, blurbs from Amazon and choose from a collection of cover art if available. The Recommendations page connected to each book is interesting. Data is mined from other LibraryThingers and Amazon to list similar books to the one chosen, also books with similar tags, books with similar subjects, and people with this book in their library also have…
The Zeitgeist aspect of LT, shows you the vital stats for the social site. There are 343, 131 members as of today, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is the top book, (in the most member libraries) and fiction is the top tag. I have joined the Australian LibraryThingers and Librarians who LibraryThing groups, to allow me to participate in discussion threads, and added more info to my profile.
Books are a great way to connect with people, so that there is a tool that facilitates this interaction is great. My library catalogue is available at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/daniel82.
P.S. The Free Range Librarian blogged this week about a LibraryThing project, which aims to catalogue the libraries of great people, such as Thomas Jefferson. It’s called “I See Dead People[’s Books]" . This is something I want to explore. Maybe tomorrow…
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