Thursday, October 9, 2008

Library Thing

It's been weeks since I could go on with this, I begin to despair of ever finishing the 23 things.
Today I did take time to go through Library Thing. At first I thought it would be just too time consuming to try to catalog my hundreds of books, but having taken the tour, I was intrigued with the idea I might find some new things to read based on shared tastes. I posted 5 books, & spent time looking at who else had read the things I had. Although it seemed strange that the Library of Congress had no copy of the novel Persuasion by Jane Austen (only critical works about it) I decided to try more recent work & had better luck.
It was interesting to peer into other's book shelves, but I can't say I saw anything that new to grab my attention. Also, strangely, the one book I wanted to rate 5 stars, it would not let me add more than 1. When I finally got in to the site, I discovered that was the average rating for that book. I don't know if they're related (can others also not give it more than one star?), butI don't have time to try to contact Library Thing & attempt to correct the situation.
I did think this might be a tool for our library to take advantage of, for all those people who want to keep track of books they've read, or to receive e-mail reccomendations of things to try, or even new books by favorite authors. The first situation I have seen many e-ref requests for, & the other 2 I have seen in recent weeks. I have no idea how much work it would take to connect us to them, but perhaps just providing a link, & letting people sign up for their own account would be sufficient. As something customers have requested, it makes a lot of sense to me, if we could offer this to them as a service--IF it was a simple thing to do.

Gardner

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