LibraryThing

I've used LibraryThing before, I like the idea of being able to add tags and make your personalized catalog searchable. I even had a chance to recommend this site to a patron. I had a retired school teacher come in inquiring about the price of Horizon and Novelist (!!??!!). She was taking a computer class, because she wanted to keep her teaching certificate valid, and in her long teaching career, after getting Master's +30, she had taken just about every educational class she could find, and they were not letting her take the same kind of class again, even Children's Lit, even though things change so fast, with so many new writers and trends. After what felt like a very long round-about reference interview, in which the patron kept inquiring about Horizon and would not devulge why she needed the information, it turned out that what she wanted was exactly what LibraryThing had to offer -- an opportunity to list titles and tag them for searching later.

Another thing I like about LibraryThing is the ability to make your catalog public. One of the uses I put LibraryThing to was to host booklists for homeschoolers on specific topics. For example, instead of creating a webpage on our homeschooling website, and type up the titles and providing links, I can put all the books in LibraryThing under a new user name, and all I do on the homeschool website is provide the link, like this -- http://www.librarything.com/catalog/HAHSAautism or http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=HAHSAunschooling At first I thought I would have to provide log-in information, and I was worried about people changing the list, but I played with it a little more and discovered that if the catalog is public, it's very easy to link to it. And it is amazing how many resources are at the user's fingertips, including links to Amazon.

On the personal level, though, as much as I liked cataloging my books, I never went back and by now I have forgotten my log in information. Creating new accounts is way too easy and there is no way to retreave log in info for the account you have created and forgot about (like me). Better luck next time, huh?

LibraryThing -- check (thing 11)!!!