Herding Cats

Los Gatos Public Library, CA, USA
Home: http://www.losgatosca.gov/index.asp?NID=42
Blog: http://losgatospubliclibrary.blogspot.com/
Catalogue: http://64.204.128.44/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=#focus

I just had to post about Los Gatos Public Library, not just because it has a wonderful name, but because they are using LibraryThing in lots of nifty ways.

They’ve added LibraryThing for Libraries to their catalogue, try the record for Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

The tag cloud and similar title list are quite visibly labelled, under the Copy/Holding information.

Where Los Gatos gets really interesting is in the other ways it uses LibraryThing: Lists of award winners, and librarian’s favourites.

On the catalogue menu bar, there’s a link to the Award Winners page. This page lists and describes 20 significant book awards,from the Alex Award to the Whitbread award. If you click on an award name, it opens the LTfL tag browser, and displays the list of books tagged with that award. This is a neat use of crowd-generated data to add functionality to your library page.

The librarians at Los Gatos have also created a library in LibraryThing (user: LGPLfavorites), and used it to create a ‘Librarian’s Favourites’ list, which they published on their blog: Our Favorite Things @ the Library (Thing).

Again, I am sorry to see that the Other editions functionality is not used, but overall, I think that this is a lovely implementation of LTfL, and I like the other ways they’ve squeezed LibraryThing functionality for their own use.