Help, Library School is Making me Blog!

I’ve always believed if you haven’t got anything interesting to say then you should babble unceasingly. This trait in my personal life has not carried over to the web where I tend to be very, very quiet. However, I’m in Library School, and I have a blog project, so here it goes!

I’m a big fan of LibraryThing (LT user: francescadefreitas) and once I saw that one of the potential topics was “Social Bookmarking [Folksonomies, Tagging, and tag clouds]” I jumped at the chance to look at LibraryThing for Libraries.

The reason I am so enthusiastic about LibraryThing for Libraries is that it provides benefit to users without a tremendous effort.

LibraryThing for Libraries can add three key bits of functionality to a library’s OPAC display:

• A subject tag cloud
• A list of other editions held by the library
• A list of similar books held by the library

If a library were to try an add this functionality to their catalogue themselves, it would be a significant effort in two parts:

• Writing the code to add the functionality, which may involve the OPAC vendor
• Collecting the data, for example, hand tagging every book in the catalogue, or asking library patrons to do it, defining FRBR relationships for every book, and writing a set of reader’s advisory recommendations for every book

LibraryThing for Libraries is a way to avoid these problems:

• They have written the software, all you have to add to the library catalogue is some simple lines of display code.
• They have a huge number of users, who for their own reasons, have gone and tagged a massive number of books, defined relationships between editions of a work, and rated and reviewed books they’ve read.

The LibraryThing for Libraries Tour provides some statistics:

• LibraryThing members have added more than 23 million tags to books.
• Related editions and translations covers 275,000 ISBNs.
• LibraryThing recommendations cover 656,000 ISBNs.

Even if all of the patrons were willing to chip in, it would not be possible for individual libraries to generate that amount of data.

In this blog I’m going to take a look at LibraryThing for Libraries, and how it has been implemented in various libraries. There is not a great deal of variation in the functionality across different libraries, but how they choose to label and display the LibraryThing data differs. Different types of libraries showcase different ways the functionality is useful.

Because LibraryThing for Libraries is intended to integrate seamlessly into the existing library catalogue, it is difficult to talk about how easy it is for patrons to locate it. I’ll mention any variations I notice in how the data is displayed. I’ll note where this functionality is featured in the Library’s blog or News page.

And I am going to use ‘LTfL’ rather than typing out LibraryThing for Libraries all the time.