Just over a year old, LibraryThing has become the place to list your books and share information about your collection. It is a site for book lovers who want to get organised, and get connected to others with interests similar to their own.
To set up all you need is a username and password. (An email address is only needed to retrieve a lost or forgotten password and can be kept private.) Once you have completed these steps, you can start work on your own LibraryThing.
But why would you want to???
LibraryThing can be used to:
- List the books you have (personally, or as a class, or in a particular location)
- List the books you want to read
- List the latest books you have actually read
- Find other similar books, which have been recommended, based on your choices
- Read reviews of others on these books
- Find out about the authors
- Join in discussions about your favourites (or not)
- Get information about your listed books from Google Books – including a summary, details about the author and other googled information.
- Add your LibraryThing to your blog – to show a random selection of books from your collection. See an example of this at: Real Reading
How?
1. Just sign up at: LibraryThing
2. Start adding books by clicking on the Add books tab:
- Use the search box with a title, author or ISBN
- Click on the link which best matches your book search (you can edit book covers later)
- Continue till you have your ‘library’ added.
3. You can then view your library by clicking on the Your Library tab. Here, you can alter the way you view your library, add or edit details, enter your own tags, and give your books a rating – all by double clicking in the appropriate box. The column to the far right gives detail about how many other users also have a particular book, and from here you can also edit details.
4. By selecting a particular book, you can view:
- reviews by others
- further recommendations
- tags used by others
- descriptions
- other details of the book added by members (e.g awards, film tie-ins, series list, etc.)
- or add your own information
# Exercise
1. Set up your own LibraryThing
2. On your blog, outline how you might use this with a class or individual. In what ways could this tool motivate students and add to their Web 2.0 experiences? Does it do anything that a private catalogue list might not? (e.g. school library catalogue)
3. Comment on how much (and what) information you might place in your LibraryThing profile and why. What approach do we need to model here for students?
