LibraryThing! You Make My Heart Sing

As I set out on the next leg of my quest for library 2.0 literacy, it has occurred to me that our library’s leadership may have a lot to thank my husband for. For instance, he has been known, on those rare and special occasions when I am being particularly annoying or whiny at home, to encourage me to blog by gently suggesting I go do my “library thing.”

Yes, there it is, folks, that’s this week’s limpid segue into the realms of krl2pt0.

I am not going to sing the praises of the many beguiling applications unique to LibraryThing. I’ll let you discover whatever particular charms it may have for you through your own explorations. I will, however, because I am not a totally mean person, tell you of its potential and immediate lures for the likes of moi. If, like me, you are one of those people who checks out more library books than you actually have time to read, you may find a parallel allure in the world of LibraryThing.

LibraryThing strikes me as uniquely suited to making long lists of books and grouping them with simple (and easily edited) tags that alert you as to why you placed those particular books on your list in the first place. For me, this appeal is primarily in the realm of “books I’d like to read” which usually aggregate in randomly penned notes in betwixt calendar pages, on the backs of bookmarks, and scattered throughout the pages of my journal. If these hastily scrawled notes (or at least the books they represent) do not make it into my library holds (all of which subsequently—and annoyingly—arrive at the same time), the papers themselves are usually lost to the winds of time, sometimes with the precise authors and titles irretrievably and tantalizingly mired in the specially fossilizing information tarpits of my mind, never to be seen or clearly remembered again.

LibraryThing offers an alternative that actually betters the Amazon wishlist by allowing you to tag your booklist with descriptors that you can easily change as books move from wishlist status to read, and then voila! You have that list of books you’ve read that we in the library world are so often encouraged to keep. Following that, you can post reviews, join discussion groups, peruse readers’ reviews, and even get suggestions based on what you’ve tagged and purportedly enjoyed. Not too different in some ways from Amazon (or from its movie equivalent Netflix), only without the sales impetus and the industry reviews, and with a more dynamic social networking aspect. No fear, though, the LibraryThing site links to the Library of Congress and to Amazon, so if you want to go to Amazon and dredge up industry reviews, you can.

On a final note, LibraryThing offers a great tool for library or readers advisory bloggers, the ubiquitous LibraryThing widget. The widget allows you to REALLY EASILY (praise the krl2pt0 powers-that-be for finally giving me an assignment I could actually, as opposed to theoretically, do in half an hour, not counting the blog time) add a link on your blog site to any grouping of books on your booklist, based on tags, random selection, or recent additions to your LibraryThing queue.


That said, slide your eyes up a notch and you will see two book jackets and one audiobook cover (all with a desert island theme) with links powered by LibraryThing widgetry. This particular selection is inspired by KRL media buyer John Fossett’s blog on that classic game of Desert Island Discs and serves as a lead in to my next blog entry, in which I will dish up my own literary take on the subject. Until then, I fully expect you to be thinking of what books you’d want to have along if you were stranded on a desert island. I mean it. I want to hear from you.