LibraryThing Lessons

Imagine a library catalog of 16 million+ books where you can create your own virtual bookshelf, add descriptive tags to your library, view thumbnails of book covers, access book lists from your mobile device, discover other readers with similar tastes, create book clubs and groups, submit and read book reviews, generate RRS feeds of your library, and more. It’s here, it’s now, it’s LibraryThing.

 

Created by Tim Spalding, a web developer, with the assistance of Abby Blachly–its “Head (and only) Librarian”–and a small staff, LibraryThing has a thing or two to teach libraries about making their catalogs more interactive, user-friendly, and flexible. Researchers today, especially “digital natives,” not only want to locate materials, but share and discuss them, control the amount of bibliographic information on the screen, add their own keywords to references, get recommendations, syndicate their collections, etc..

Unless library catalogs join the Web 2.0 revolution soon, tech-savvy patrons will simply migrate to information sources that are more responsive to their needs. This does not mean, of course, that we do away with decades of LC subject headings and existing catalog records—both are still extremely useful and have been crafted by generations of dedicated librarians. Instead, we should explore new ways of merging existing metadata with social tagging and social networking technologies (as UPENN has done with their PennTags initiative), enable users to customize views and fields, and allow them to create, share, and access their personal libraries in ways that are truly respond to their needs.

No one would suggest that LibraryThing is the ideal model for academic researchers, but it does suggest some ways in which Web 2.0 tools and features can bring a new vitality and utility to the library OPAC.