Some of these things are quite like the others

North Vancouver City Library, BC Canada
Home: http://www.cnv.org/nvcl/
Blog: http://www.cnv.org/nvcl//server.aspx?c=1&i=3
Catalogue: http://209.52.67.3/ipac20/ipac.jsp?forcelogout=true&profile=main&lang=eng

North Vancouver City Library (NVCL) blogged about its use of LibraryThing in February 2008. It was one of the first two libraries in Canada to use LTfL. In their catalogue, you can now see a tag cloud, which I looked at in my post about the Danbury Public Library. They chose not to display the other editions data I looked at in my post on the Claremont Colleges catalogue. I’ll use the NVCL as an example of LTFL’s recommendation functionality – Similar works.

In LibraryThing user create records of the books in their collections. Using this data, LibraryThing calculates the likelihood of two books appearing in the same collection. This likelihood can be used to predict books that may be similar in theme or content. For example, look at the NVCL catalogue record for The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory.

By using the LibraryThing data on likelihood of books appearing in the same collection, the record can provide links to other books the library holds that are potentially similar. One click opens the catalogue record for the selected book.

Good Stuff:

• An instant recommendation system. As John Wenzler said in A Workshop on Next Generation Libraries (.pdf), “There are thousands of LibraryThing users who have tagged millions of books on the site. Consequently, LibraryThing has harvested a rich collection of user-generated metadata about books that it presents in tag clouds and uses to make recommendations.”

Could be Better Stuff:

• You can lose some time following a path of interesting books from one record to another
• Statistical recommendations are not always accurate, and the essence that someone is looking for in a similar book may not be captured.

Other Stuff
A few things I wanted to note about how NVCL implemented LTfL:

• I initially disliked the way the LTfL data was displayed in the side menu, I thought it was too thin. But it did grow on me.
• It is a pity that they did not include the Other editions functionality.

Next I’ll look at an example of non-fiction tagging.