Thing 8: be your own librarian

...aka Library Thing.

For a little while now I have used LibraryThing as a way of promoting new books on my fashion business blog.  When I get the order slips for books I simply add the ISBN into my LibraryThing account and it updates the widget on my blog.  Visually it looks nice and it's an easy way to keep a record (and to promote) new books in the library. I also like the way you can separate the books into collections so I can still add other books into my library without it affecting the collection of fashion business new books.  It can be seen in situ at http://www.westminsterfashionbusiness.blogspot.com/

I've always wanted to explore a bit further the possibilities LibraryThing offers such as doing something with the RSS feed or organising collections/tags based on module reading lists but time for exploration always evades me.  Also when Library Search came along it seemed to offer some of these possibilities anyway (such as tagging and saving to the e-shelf to then be emailed on), but again time to fully explore and exploit is somewhere far in the distance.  So for now my new books feed on my fashion business blog is as far as I have got. 

Having logged into my LibraryThing account for 23 things and having started to think I was creating a weird mixture adding favourite "reading books" to the business and fashion books collections, a vague recollection of having a "personal" LibraryThing account floated into my head. A few username and password combinations later and hey presto a glorious collection of books returned to me as if old friends.  I then remembered being very bored a couple of years ago and in the excitement of discovering LibraryThing back then I had attempted to add from memory books I had read.  I gave up soon after never to return to this Library Thing account again until today.  Just logging in now though I find messages such as someone has added me to a list of their "interesting libraries".  It's certainly eclectic if not interesting (where else would you find Virgil rubbing shoulders with Karl Pilkington).  The library can be viewed here.  No room to add a widget to my blog so I'll just add this to this post instead: 10 of my favourite books of all time.   


Summary of Thing 8:  quite a drain on time if you want to do some retro-cataloguing but a great tool if you are adding a few books every so often to keep a collection together.  Depending on its different uses it strikes me both as completely pointless (as seen in my collection of personal books) and really quite useful (as seen in my "new books in the library" collection).  I think Library Search now offers the kind of interactivity with tagging that I'd often envisaged using with LibraryThing so I perhaps will only move away from LibraryThing, not towards, in the future.