Yep, I was right – I love LibraryThing. Having now managed to create an account and add some books I can confidently say that here is the Thing I like best so far about Cam23. It took a little time at first to get used to navigating around and finding the best way to add records for my books, but a little bit of patience goes a long way and I’ve been having great fun adding books to my shelf and tinkering with the details to get them ‘just so’.
Having explored a bit more, I think I would stick with my initial impressions and say that this is something that works best for small libraries with little resource for cataloguing, and new acquisitions or discrete collections in larger libraries. I agree with Miss Crail when she says that, as an institution if you’re going to go down this road it needs to be done professionally and not half-heartedly. And I can imagine that Girl in the Moon, as an ‘inveterate tinkerer’ could be kept going for several weeks by this site.
I’ve gone for a personal account and added 20 or so books out of the hundreds on the shelves at home – my other half keeps hinting that, as a librarian, perhaps I’d like to catalogue our collection(!). The answer is ‘No’, but this may be just the thing (excuse the pun). I’m not sure that I’d bother to review many of my books, unless I felt particularly moved to – there aren’t enough hours in the day, and I could spend the time reading :-), but I like being able to ‘rate’ the books and it’s interesting seeing the variety of tags that can be assigned to the same book.
On the downside, I find it a little bit irritating that you can’t seem to browse LibraryThing from your homepage – the easiest way seemed to be through the ‘add books’ tab, which isn’t really what I want. And I’m not convinced this widgety thing is going to work when I hit ‘publish’, but both these minor niggles could be entirely due to my own ineptitude rather than anything else.
Overall, a huge thumbs up for LibraryThing! Hurrah!
whispersinthewilderness 
Girl in the Moon Said:
on July 16, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Post to come from me re: LibraryThing. Not sure it will keep me going for weeks, though writing about why not is taking me forever.