LibraryThing for Libraries

Reducing the suckage by partnering with 269,212 readers

14Sept07

librarything

LibraryThing.com
A social site for book people
Regular people, cataloging their own books
Tags as subject descriptors
Reveiws, discussions, widgets for users
Works page, Author page, User page, User's libraries
Tremendous amount of data
Suggester offers recommendations based on what people read, not buy
Tags created by readers, not publicists

LTFL's official site

Thingology shows the development of LTFL

librarything

Bridget Jones's Diary (the suggestions have already changed!)
Book Lust
Tags, Suggestions, Other Editions (FRBR light)

book heart

Why not?

LibraryThing is fun
Ann Arbor's Social Catalog. So great, but hard to do!
If our patrons could add tags, how many would there be?
A way to add innovative features without paying through the nose
Like most libraries, we don't have a programming team, money to hire a programming team or access to our ILS's code

photo from: stock.xchng

monkey

This was embarrassingly easy for me.

LibraryThing sent me some javascript
Copy
Paste
Dance with Joy

photo from: stock.xchng

No

DPL is on iii WebPac Classic
That meant the code had to go in the "bottom logo" file
LibraryThing is entirely ISBN driven
Before we were officially live, LT data showed up in strange places
LT fixed it in under an hour. No, really

Staff likes it (especially for Reader's Advisory)
When we show patrons, they love it
Working with a company like LT is a radicalizing experience
We could not have done this on our own or with a typical ILS vendor
In many public libraries, it is easy to feel that we're ahead of the user and this is a gentle innovation
Pre-fab folksonomy offers a good balance between the trend of big picture resource sharing and small and medium sized libraries needed emphasis on local

The LibraryThing people are really easy to talk to. Not your typical vendor experience.

LibraryThing for Libraries
casey@librarything.com

I'm happy to chat about this more

ksheehan@danburylibrary.org
Loose Cannon Librarian (My personal, not speaking for the library blog)

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