Reading the articles about LibraryThing and libraries, particularly the sections on embedding LibraryThing widgets into OPACs, raised several questions for me:
1) What is a library catalogue actually for?
2) Do my users want more than the current catalogue is offering? If so, is it the library's job to provide it (with or without LibraryThing)?
3) If they do, it is, and it is reviews and user-defined tags that they want, who is writing the reviews and creating the tags in LibraryThing, and are they to be trusted?
4) What are the implications of providing the kind of features that LibraryThing offers?
I guess that I basically believe that a library catalogue is first and foremost there to allow users to quickly and efficiently establish whether or not the collection contains an item, and then find it on the shelves. Or possibly whether it provides access to an e-resource. Do reviews help with this? I don't, personally, think so - they are perhaps a distraction, and unless they can be vetted, potentially misleading, though perhaps they give users a sense of being involved in the library service if they are user-created. And of course they are only of any use if people actually create them. If not, it's a dead feature. My experience of reviews on Amazon are very mixed. Some are informed and well-written, others are ... well, frankly not. Do recommendations of similar books help with accessing items in the collection more effectively? Possibly, but that very much depends on the quality of the information on which the recommendations are being made. Anyone who has read my blog thus far will know that I have reservations about tagging by all and sundry. Perhaps it would work better if library-controlled to a greater or lesser extent.
My general impression is that undergraduates (our main users) generally come in with their reading lists, find what they can from them via the OPAC, borrow them, and go away. I may be maligning students here, but my experience as an Oxford arts undergraduate was that it was frequently all that I could do to read the reading lists, let alone anything not recommended, and I don't think that I was particularly unusual in this. Maybe following the lists does nothing for their research skills, and independent thought, and as a library we should be encouraging these. On the other hand, my library only really has the resources to provide reading list books anyway. Given that books in my library are bought on the recommendation of the department or faculty, and the teaching staff, do they need any further recommendation or review? If there is a good classification scheme in place, shelf-browsing can sometimes be as quick as computer searching in a small library (depending on the subject - if very multi-disciplinary, perhaps not so much so). Other kinds of library may have different needs, though. In a public library, reviews, and recommendations of similar books could be of more use, I think. In libraries with a great many books, which are used by researchers following less directed courses of study, there might also be benefits to linking other books to catalogue records. Speaking for myself, though, if I'm looking for something specific in a library, I don't want "fancy extras" - I want an uncluttered record that tells me that I've got the right book, and where it is located.
We have one OPAC terminal in my library, and that is all that there is space for. We currently don't put records for e-books into the catalogue that we use for circulation because we don't want users monopolising that one computer by reading e-books or e-journals at it. If users were offered the option to read reviews, and spend time clicking on tags, and following links, the same monopolisation could happen. Perhaps it is possible to offer the LibraryThing widget on some computers but not others, but it sounds as though it is embedded into the library software somehow, so would appear everywhere. I can't help feeling that, as with some of the other Things we've looked at, there is potential for distraction from the task in hand.
Paper LibraryThing? [my caption]
Photograph by Skokie Public Library (from Flickr under Creative Commons)So, how about LibraryThing for my own books? Are librarians supposed to have so many books that they have to catalogue them? Do they have to want to catalogue their books because they have them, even if they are doing this as part of their job? I do have books, but not so many that I've ever felt the need to catalogue them. Yes, it's a nice idea to have a catalogue, and might be useful if anything ever happened to the collection, but they are well-organised on the shelves (when not in boxes, as they are at the moment - I've been gradually decorating my new(ish) house, not helped by a leak that damaged some of the new papering and painting ...), so I can find them. I read many more books than I actually have, but ... I use libraries! I love books, but don't buy them unless I feel that I will read them more than once - I love the environment as well! I have a collection of choral scores, which would make quite a nice small, discrete catalogue. I'm not sure how many music score records LibraryThing contains. I got a few results for the one search that I did, but I couldn't remember the edition, so it wasn't a very rigorous test. Alternatively, I could catalogue my poetry books. Problem is, they are all in boxes ... Must I sign up for an account and catalogue something? Yes, I've just checked the Thing details, and it seems that it is part of the exercise, so I have. Luckily signing up is incredibly easy - apart from trying to choose a username not already taken - and only requires two bits of information. I've added a book that I know is in my collection (without being able to check the complete details):
I wanted to use the Library of Congress rather than Amazon to get the record, but it didn't appear to have the right edition. I gather that I can use options to change the cover, etc. once a record has been downloaded, but as I don't have time for editing now, I just took the record from Amazon. I would trust the Library of Congress' cataloguing more than Amazon's ... I really don't care how many other people have got this book, or what they thought about it, though I have this information from the site. I guess that the list of similar titles is moderately interesting, though I don't have any immediate plans to buy or borrow anything on this subject. The recommendations attached to this title are all more or less relevant, though some are more specific than others, dealing with particular illuminated manuscripts, rather than illuminated manuscripts in general. I would think that some books with less well-defined subjects could throw up a very random selection of recommendations, a number of which could well be irrelevant, particularly if a great many tags have been added to a title, covering even very minor aspects of it.
Libraries which can't afford library software could no doubt benefit from using LibraryThing, as a start to making their collection accessible, though the catalgoue might look a bit like Amazon ... Whether it is the best product available for little money, I don't know - I am not aware of any competitors. Would I use it in my library, as an extra tool, rather than as a widget in the library software? Probably not - I can create most lists via our library software much more quickly, if necessary (even if they won't necessarily have lots of pictures and reviews attached).
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