I can imagine that LibraryThing is a dream come true for many librarians. Spend all day cataloguing books at your library then go home and catalogue the books on your bookshelf! Unfortunately I'm not an 'eat, sleep and breathe books and libraries' kind of person so the books I have at home (many of which were impulse buys which haven't left the shelves since I bought them) will remain uncatalogued. Despite this I'm still quite impressed by LibraryThing (although I keep having the impulse to type LibraryThang...must resist).
To test it I searched for a book I had read and enjoyed (The Help by Kathryn Stockett). LibraryThang (sorry!) gave me user ratings, user reviews, published reviews, links to Amazon, Worldcat and others, tags, links to the imdb page for the upcoming film, lists of prizes won, lists of characters, the first line of the book, and what I appreciated most - LibraryThang recommendations and user recommendations. Usually I rely on Amazon recommendations but I get annoyed that I bought a book about Homer's Odyssey in year 12 and I am still being recommended the Iliad 11 years later.
I really like the use of tags on LibraryThang. Since they are much less rigid than keywords I can imagine search results being much more varied. I can see that this could also be a bad thing though(information overload)and some of the tags for this book are a bit odd - more like mini essays than tags. LibraryThang does put the most regularly used tags in bold which is helpful though.
So the next 'Thing' is to set up an account. I suspect I'll be a browser rather than a contributor but I'll keep an open mind.
Oooh, interesting to see that you liked The Help! It's on my list...
ReplyDeleteYes, I read it in a couple of days which is really unusual for me. I usually carry the same book around in my bag for 6 months then give up and start something else!
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