I’m sure there’s a ton of librarians and library support folks out there who’ve known all about Library Thing for week, months, now. I admit I just found out about it by meand of this testimonial from Andy’s website:
‘Judy: “Have you already found Library Thing? I think it’s pretty cool – a way to catalog
your library online. A while back I considered buying a cataloging program but
they seemed too expensive and/or too complex for my purposes but this is really
cool. It’s in BETA and you can list up
to 200 books free or pay a lifetime fee of ten bucks for unlimited listing. All sorts of neat features.’"
So I went, I signed in (anybody can sign in, all you need is a user name and a password and the app create a customizable profile for you), and I got permission to catalog 200 books (you’re given an empty work space to use as you like) according to title, author, date, XML tags, include comments or share records with others. (A paid account costs $10 for the priviledge of cataloging as many books as you want, and apparently never needs to be renewed.) All but the Comments fields are hyperlinkable to other records.
One tab link that stood out was "extras". That one leads to some pretty nifty stuff: there’s a javascript editor that lets you write and style "Widgets" which update in real time and you can paste into the HTML on your own blog. You can also export all your records to CSV files if you want to make Excel spreadsheets of your work, and design "Amazon bookmarklets" which lets you import records from Amazon.com once you’ve found a book to your liking.
Speaking of blogs, Library Thing has its own, also viewable on their website.
The Library Thing Zetgeist (another tab) has a collection of links leading to the 25 largest libraries, the most recent users and books added to the site, the top 25 books, and the top 25 tags that people have used (it look like they rank according to frequency of use), not to mention top 25 authors and books added in the last hour.
Searching is a little mimited for my taste but it works pretty well: search according to book title, tag, or user, and in each case you have the option of searching your little corner of Library Thing (your libraries or you tags) or the whole database.
From what little I’ve seen, it’s not a bad resource at all.
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