For ECN book-lovers: LibraryThing

It’s funny what you come up with when you’re supposed to be writing up a big old document (in my case, the final polished version of the SHEEN Sharing Literature Review and Requirements Review docs). Was thinking about LibraryThing, which is possibly my favourite Web 2.0 app, and one I only use for personal stuff.

It’s a huge favourite out there to, particularly as a cross-over into the web for Luddite book-lovers. Basically, you can make a web catalogue of all your books, and include reviews, ratings and tags. And you can see others’ reviews and ratings, and get automatic recommendations, and join groups of like-minded others.

When I joined I even wrote away for their lovely barcode reader in the shape of a cat (oh how they know their target audience!). Because you don’t have to manually catalogue your books: you can just enter the ISBN, and you’ll get the full catalogue record immediately. Plus a nice little thumbnail image of the book’s cover.

Thinking about applications of LibraryThing for SHEEN Sharing: some folk mentioned that many of their favourite resources are non-digital, hard copy only. Here’s a way of sharing those. Because, like everything else, LibraryThing offers feeds and widgets, so we can expose our recommended employability resources via our Netvibes page.

Also, small libraries now use LibraryThing to catalogue their collections online. There are a number of English university careers’ services already cataloguing their libraries there. To see what a LibraryThing feed looks like in Netvibes, go to the Student Resources tab on our Employability page; you’ll see one from The Careers Group (UoL), and one from King’s College London. NB: You can see reviews and recommendations, where available, by clicking on the books’ titles.

At the moment, as with Diigo, LibraryThing appears to have a small bug in its feed capabilities. It offers the ability to have a feed based on a search for the tag “employability”, but the feed doesn’t work. I’ve contacted them to find out if it’s a known bug, and when it will be fixed.

In the meantime though, if folk think it’s a nice idea, and if you have books and other hard-copy resources you want to share, we could start up a SHEEN Sharing LibrayThing account and start entering stuff there.

Only if there’s a demand though: we want to focus on Diigo first!