Ooooh, what a marvellous toy LibraryThing is! Being able to catalogue all your books, read reviews, get new ideas for interesting reads and share favourites with others - why, that's the pull librarianship had over me as a child, that's the reason I became a librarian in the first place, aged, well, something negligeable! I've created my brand new LibraryThing account in less time than it's taken me to type this and will be spending a lot of time on LibraryThing over the next few months... you see, I have a fair few books at home. How exciting!
I was interested to read more about LibraryThing's background in Aaron Rutkoff's Social Networking for Bookworms which I thought helped put some aspects of the site into perspective, mainly this curious cross between nerdy (some of us at least!) booklovers and fashionable social networking.
From a librarian's perspective however, I remain circumspect about its possible use in a "real" library (sorry, I just mean a "non-private" library): I can understand why people would jump at the chance of creating their own tags and gaining ownership of the organisation of material, but the inevitable confusion that ensues when tags get mixed up, forgotten, partially updated, and the obvious fact that tags can be so personal since a word/tag/label can mean one thing to someone and something completely different to someone else... must give us pause. For in this information overloaded world of ours, why would anyone want to invite more chaos than exists already? I wouldn't want to use it as a main OPAC tool, but would cautiously welcome its use for a virtual new books display for example, pending further investigation and sneaky peaks at what uses other libraries have already made of LibraryThing.
No comments:
Post a Comment