This Comes from Working in the Library

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.

And the Winner is…

I was surprised to learn that there were lots of awards for Web 2.0 features, and that there were so many different categories (I didn’t know what half of them did!). I ended up looking through the award winners, because the list of nominees was harder to wade through and had a lot of extra links to follow.

Here are a couple of the websites I explored. I looked at all the winning websites under the Books category (the natural place for a bookwyrm to look, right?). I wasn’t too impressed with www.lulu.com, since it was an online publishing company and wouldn’t be very helpful with reader advisory. I thought www.biblio.com was sort of like an Amazon, except limited to books and more for private use than library use.

I was most interested in www.librarything.com, because it is (supposedly) the largest book club in the world! Here you can find people with similar tastes and get recommendations on different books to read, and they aren’t necessarily only new books. You can also tag books and blog about books. Joining Library Thing only requires creating a user ID and password. The major drawback is that they charge for membership.L Sign up is free and you can have up to 200 books in your profile, but if you want to enter unlimited numbers of books it’s 10$ for a yearly membership or 25$ for a lifetime membership.

I looked at a couple of the online word processing websites. I was excited with this discovery, because they could be useful to the customers who need word processing but don’t have Microsoft Word. I was unimpressed with www.writeboard.com for several reasons. I didn’t find it very user friendly—Writeboard required html code to format the document. It is designed to allow for collaboration because all files require separate log-ins to access them and you can share the log-in with your collaborators. It is for people comfortable with the internet; less so for people who are only looking for a word processor to use.

I have signed up for a Google account, and I haven’t looked at all the features available to a user until I saw that Google had won first place in the Collaborative Writing and Word Processing category for http://docs.google.com. I guess it’s no surprise that Google has become the place to go for quick information searches and even for basic word processing and simple spreadsheets, too. The design was more similar to Word and easier to use. Google Docs also had a nice auto save feature that saves what you type every few minutes. Of course, you would have to create a Google account to access all these useful features.

There are many websites with incredible features and options, and we only need to discover what’s out there to take advantage of them.