January 19, 2007

Readers' Advisory via LibraryThing?

Heard Tim Spaulding's talk at last October's NEASIS&T Embedded Library program (link to podcast & more info) about LibraryThing and I got inspired. I'd heard about it for ages, of course, but finally I had some time to play with it today.



I plan to use it to keep track of the novels I read. I can never remember what I read before the current title (and I go through about 1 a week) and it seems like a loss not to remember these books. Some of them are great, many are good enough (esp. since I stop reading if they're no good) -- but I only remember a very few.

I had been finding book reviews in LexisNexis, printing them out, and storing them in a binder. I have about 3 years worth of reviews, but I gave that up last fall -- just too much work. But now, a few months into not tracking what I'm reading, I miss it.

I (loosely) cataloged about half of my recent reads in LibraryThing -- I can remember my current book (easy enough to double check that title!) and the one just before that, but earlier than that? No way. Maybe LibraryThing will do the trick.

As I was madly adding books, it occurred to me that this is a great Readers' Advisory resource. I came up with several books I want to read based on what I'd already added to LibraryThing, which I tagged 2B Read (and indicating which books are at UConn!).

Wouldn't this be a fun thing to do with patrons at the desk?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is great! I want to set up my own Library Thing, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. I just love the idea of organizing things that way, and it would also help me to remember books I read, but don't own. My mom reads 100+ books a year. She really has trouble keeping track of what she reads - sometimes she'll start reading a book and get this feeling that she's already read it - so a few (actually probably more like 10) years ago she decided to start keeping a record of them, in notebooks because she doesn't use a computer (gasp!).

Anonymous said...

I'm back. I just created an account - hee!

(Only one book entered so far though.)