Who would have thought that so many people would feel the need to categorize all the books they’ve ever read and liked? Clearly, this is a popular hobby because Library Thing has so many members that it can boast about being the largest online book club in the world. Membership is free up to 200 books in your catalog, and then you have to pay for a yearly or lifetime membership. That little tidbit sort of took the fun out of cataloguing my own library; I now have to worry about staying within my limit when I have so many favorite books I want to add. I ran into Library Thing back in Thing 19 and have been slowly adding books into my library since.
The work to get my Visual Shelf from Library Thing to show up was practically another triple lesson for me! In addition to learning about Library Thing, I learned to add links and other page elements to my blog, to make certain text in my blog hyperlinks, and to search for the html code for materials to embed into my blog. For the longest time my blog was extremely plain without any Widgets or decorations, but after all these extra lessons (mostly from other co-workers), I can proudly say my blog isn’t so bland anymore. I went on a slight detour from the discovery exercise to adding hyperlinks in some of my previous blog entries, to find widgets for my blog (I had a slight disaster on my blog when certain widgets were inserted too many times; I also tried to alter the dimensions of a widget to fit it into my blog), including a list of links to some of my fellow bloggers on my page, and adding a cool photo slideshow on my page!
I found the experience overwhelming when I searched for favorite books, because some titles have lots of different editions and I have the option of choosing the edition that I liked. I found some books in my favorite series grouped together, but their pictures rarely appeared while on my bookshelf. I found it slightly confusing how to include and modify tags, especially with the older entries; I still find myself unable to edit the tags on them. Library Thing has the option for you to add favorite authors, but the process sometimes work and sometimes doesn’t (or I fumbled my way onto the correct path the first time and now can’t repeat the steps).
Library Thing clearly offers more to readers who become members than those who just want to browse around. If you’re not a member, you can still get quite a bit out of the experience. Non-members can search Library Thing’s catalog for information about a favorite book, read the posts from discussion groups and look at the statistics for different categories in Library Thing, People can get book recommendations for titles they might like (and even recommendations for books to avoid based on the title they searched for!).
Perhaps, Library Thing is the solution for some of our customer woes. Take for instance those customers who always want to know what the title of that great book they’ve read (and then bemoan the fact that the Library doesn’t keep records of previous checkouts). If they have a Library Thing account, they can save the title in their very own catalog! Those people who want to join book clubs or find others with similar reading tastes? Well, Library Thing has plenty of them—surely there is going to be something for everyone! Now, all we have to do is persuade those same customers to check out Library Thing while making sure they still have reasons to visit the Library.
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