Thing 14. LibraryThing

Now here was a tool, LibraryThing, I was looking forward to exploring...I've been hearing some buzz about this site in the library press as a pretty neat cataloging tool that might have possibilities for getting book lovers to organize their collections on-line, so that other book people might learn from each other, maybe share their own collections, and even form a social network to get some good conversations going on the titles out there...

I explored this site quite intensively and felt there were many good things about the site that can be recommended...as you can see above it is kind of cool to see your own book covers listed, and tag clouds or author clouds, and other visual representation of a book collection...and blog-wise, I was particularly impressed with the amount of comments and verbal jabbering that people put out commenting on all sorts of things, particularly at the LibraryThing blog where ideas could be culled if you had the patience to keep reading through it all...

But unfortunately there are a number of problems with this site...I get the feeling that this is still a very basic framework for what the developers really wanted to do...much of the collection options are not very flexible, sort of puts you in a straight jacket at times when you want to do something more practical and organized...the Livia_Llewellyn library collection that was linked by 23 Things is a good example of some of the problems the site has...just a long, long list of book covers that go on and on, meaning nothing much...here is where I can see real live library catalogers saying to themselves that they are still going to be needed at the old library...this site, as presently constructed, won't be replacing them soon...wouldn't a cataloger want to organize these titles in a more meaningful way? Now I know, don't get excited, that you can turn the book covers into a list, but did you see what you get?...just the bare bones of information put in some mysterious random order--are the titles grouped by year published, by genre, by recommendations, by author, by what exactly??? You better get some tag searching done to make sense of this collection...and note there are no comments by the titles to guide you in any way...this collection is a catalogers nightmare, if you ask me, (but don't, because I am only to talking to myself anyway...)

Okay, you say, but if you click on a particular title you can get deeper into the databases, and from there get to book descriptions and such, but what a backward way to find something...just keep clicking on random titles till you stumble upon something that interests you...encouraging blind hunting is not the cataloger's mission in life, even if a reader eventually finds it. This is not good cataloging, which has the important purpose to want to actually organize and guide right up front, not way in the back, and seeks, in the beginning, to be helpful to the searcher, so that exploring the depth of a collection is intelligently done and productive...not a random hit or miss exercise to kill time...

Let me give you an example that I tried to do, I hoped, with LibraryThing...and I am sure its very typical among book people...I wanted only to list all my book club's titles in the exact order that we will be reading them, with the future dates we are meeting, and with a book description right under the titles upfront, and with the members names listed as partipants, and with a recommendation system that is not star-based, but number based, which is how we do it in my book club...well, as far as I can tell, absolutely no way here...at least, I couldn't do it...maybe if I knew some HTML coding I could manipulate the site more...but then I might as well put out my own site and get rich...

Now please, don't blame me for being harsh, I am Shocker boy, after all (my mom named me that even before I had that hair)...its just that I want to keep the blog honest, in the blogging tradition...this is a site that is developing...it's not there yet, it's a little too stiff, but someday this might be the place to hang out...but for me, and if you are really, really honest...isn't Amazon.com a lot more fun??