LibraryThing

I was at the Innovative Ideas forum in Canberra and I saw Abby Blachly speak about LibraryThing.

I think the idea of social cataloguing is a good one and LibraryThing is obviously popular and well used, but I was skeptical about the ways it was trying to market itself to libraries. It offers an API which libraries can use to integrate a tag-based browsing feature or recommendations into a Library catalogue's web interface using small 'widgets'. However, it seems so walled-in and inflexible; a marketing exercise for LibraryThing intended to gain itself a reputation in the library community as being 'library-worthy', rather than a no-strings-attached offering to improve the experience of library web users throughout the world, which it appears to market itself as.

LibraryThing has a business model closely modelled on Flickr. It makes its money from users paying for yearly subscriptions, while offering users a reduced-functionality account, with a limit of 200 items among other things, for free. Like Flickr, it offers sharing, not of photos but of book collections: which books you have in your virtual 'library'. It collects information about books such as the tags various users have given the book, ratings and comments. It compiles some useful information. For example, LibraryThing is able to figure out recommendations for a certain book based on which other books the people who have given that book a high rating also liked.

I guess the thing that irks me is the way in which it markets itself to libraries, but is not flexible enough to provide something that will be really useful for library customers. It speaks about offering the usefulness of tag-based search to library catalogues, but the tags that appear link back to LibraryThing's website. In order to add a tag to a book, the end user needs to do so at LibraryThing's website, and have a LibraryThing account. Integration into library catalogues the world over will give LibraryThing a lot of new customers, and yet deliver a feature of dubious worth to the library catalogues themselves. If libraries want tag based browsing, they would be better off finding a system that will integrate into their own catalogue, rather than LibraryThing's, allowing their own users to define the tags and allowing the browsing to be better integrated into the user experience of the catalogue, rather than as a small widget that pops up a small separate LibraryThing-provided window.

As a social networking site I think it's pretty good, though I don't intend to use it. I already use other social sites which I am happy with, and I am not keen on paying money for an account if I were to get serious about cataloguing my books. I have more than 200 books, and am not really gripped by the idea of cataloguing them for the world to peruse.