Thing#12

Moving along at a nice clip, though still far from caught up, I've reached Thing #12: A thing about LibraryThing.

Of course, it's impossible to work in a library and not know about LibraryThing. It is one of the hot topics in libraries right now. My library, the Criss Library at UNO, uses the tags from LibraryThing for Libraries in our catalog. Look at the title Freakonomics to see an example. (Scroll down to the bottom of the record for the tags.)

I haven't started a LibraryThing account before now because I didn't really see the need for it in my personal life. It may seem surprising that as much as I love cataloging, I haven't cataloged my home library. But I do have my collections divided by subject, and I have no trouble finding anything whenever I want it. So my system works for me. Besides, LibraryThing has a fee if you want to catalog more than 200 books, and I'd go way over that.

But this exercise got me to thinking that LibraryThing can be used for many things. So I decided to use it to keep track of books I've borrowed from friends or libraries--things I've read and enjoyed enough that I might want to look it up again sometime, but which I do not actually own. I am not going to record books I disliked and wouldn't read again or books I loved so very much that I immediately ran out and bought my own copy so I'd always have it on hand (after all, those are on my shelves for me to see anytime). And, unfortunately, I'm not going to include the many, many books I really liked but have forgotten the titles of. Those are just gone forever. But with LibraryThing, maybe I can keep that problem from happening again.

And maybe later I may use it to keep track of books I'm interested in checking out later, instead of that five-page Word document I've got them all listed in.

I really only intended to add about ten books today, but once you start, it's hard to stop! I ended up adding thirty. My username is LunaMurphy, if you'd like to see my list.

I wasn't as happy with searching in LibraryThing. I searched for The Story of the Stone, an exact title, and it came back with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as the first hit, and the book I was looking for nowhere on the first five pages. It wouldn't do an exact phrase search with quotation marks, either. I went over to Amazon and found it on the first page (even though it still wasn't the first entry). Then I went back to LibraryThing with the author's name and found it more easily. For several of my books, I had to go to my library's catalog or to Amazon to get enough information to find it in LibraryThing.

I do, however, like that there is something resembling authority control on the tags. I tagged my books "do not own," and when connecting to other users, that tag is rendered "unowned." The LibraryThing tag info for "unowned" says, "Includes: unowned, @unowned, DoNotOwn, Don'tOwn, Don’tOwn, _NOT.OWNED, do no own, do not have, do not own, don't own, dont have, dont own, not owned, not-own, not-owned, notowned." Nice way to round up similar tags without forcing people to use a controlled vocabulary.

A side observation: LibraryThing is not afraid to try things that are helpful to readers but harmful to bookstores, things you'll never see from Amazon. Check out LibraryThing's Unsuggester. It's the antithesis of the typical "If you liked X, you might also like Y" recommendation system. Unsuggester offers the equally useful counter, "If you liked X, you'll probably hate Z." What better way to say, "That book sucked," than by saving other readers the pain of suffering through it?