I know many of you enjoyed our lesson on
LibraryThing in Learning 2.0. There has been a lot happening at LT since that post so I thought we'd take a look at it again.
What's the same?
- Costs $25 for a lifetime membership. Really not that much
- Can catalog 200 books for free
Some stats:
- Over 313,000 users have signed up
- Over 20 million books have been cataloged
- Users have applied over 26 million tags to their books
What's new or what we didn't cover last time:
LibraryThing for Libraries - basically it allows you to mine LibraryThings wealth of information for your Libraries' catalog.
What does LTFL do?
LibraryThing for Libraries enhances your catalog in three ways:
- Book recommendations - these show high-quality "recommended" or "similar" books.
- Tag clouds - tags are descriptive terms about the book, and function as descriptors and points to search from, which is more powerful and flexible than searching using an OPAC alone. ?read more about tags?
- Other editions and translations - links to related editions and translations of the same work (a "FRBR-like" concept).
Basically rather than relying on your patron base to tag, review and rate. Libraries get access to the collective input from LibraryThing users. Examples of
Libraries using LibraryThing for LibrariesLibraryThing Local - If you've been using your LibraryThing account you might have noticed a new tab recently - "Local" This new service kicked off March 3rd and as off writing this post (3/8/08 10:30 am central time) over 13,000 venues and over 1,100 events have been added.
LibraryThing Local is a new sub-site devoted to finding, mapping and describing the world's bookstore, library, book fair and festival—as well as all the readings, signings, lectures and other events they host.
Go take a look at your account. I've added MRRL and our major upcoming events, see if you can find it and "favotie" it. What other ways could Libraries use this?
LibraryThing on your Cellphone - if you have a cell phone with web browsing capabilities this little feature lets you access your account from your phone. Handy if you're like me and have a want to buy list of books a mile long and can't remember which one you've actually already bought when you're standing in the bookstore.
Some more links:
Love tools like Goodreads and LibraryThing for tracking your books but wonder about your Music collection, DVDs or games?
Like so many of the online catalogs you can add tags to your collection, write reviews and see who else owns them.
