Thursday, November 11, 2010

LibraryThing

LibraryThing is a wonderful online resource to discover new books you may like. At Borders, I constantly get questions like "I read ___ series and am looking for something similar. What do you recommend?" Because we do not have access to the internet, it is extremely hard to help that customer find something along the lines of what he or she is looking for. In a library setting, LibraryThing would prove to be tremendously useful (especially for reference services) to help patrons find books that will interest them.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed this site and will use it often in the future. However, at the risk of repeating myself from previous blog entries, [I won't rant too much about this] but I have an even larger issue with "tagging" your catalog entries with tags you choose. Each field in a MARC record means something specific and is even more specific by adding numbers for the 1st and 2nd indicators. In the 7XX fields, one makes added entries from the LOC Authority Files (if a work has a varying title, you would put the uniform title there so that it is easily accessible). I suppose that LibraryThing wants to make itself very user-friendly but I foresee bad things ahead without controlled vocabulary...

You can check out my library here

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