Crystal clear cataloguing

Waterford Institute of Technology, Co. Waterford, Ireland
Home: http://library.wit.ie/
Blog: http://witlibrary.wordpress.com/
Catalogue: http://witcat.wit.ie/search/

In July 2007, the Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) was the first academic library, and the first non-US library to implement LibraryThing for Libraries. When I looked at tagging at the Danbury Public Library, I saw how tags were useful for giving an idea of the theme and content of novel. But tagging is not just good for fiction!

The WIT Library announced these new features on their Library Blog, and LibraryThing announced the implementation on their Thingology Blog.

Take a look at the WIT catalogue record for Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. It is interesting to compare the LTfL tags with the Subject Headings.

In this case, the LT tag cloud provides a much richer indication of the book’s content.

Of course, LTfL tags so not always provide a deeper indication of the content, if you look at the record for The Design and Evolution of C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup, you can see that the Subject Tag “C++ (Computer program language)” isn’t really improved on by the tags in the LT tag cloud:

While it made me smile, the tag “cool” is not particularly useful.

Good Stuff
I do really like the way that the LT data is highlighted by the grey background – while not the most appealing design, it certainly does draw attention to the wealth of information in the tag cloud and the similar books list.

Could be Better Stuff
Alas, I couldn’t find an example of the Other editions functionality – but the library’s blog post says that it is available.