week 5, thing 11 ~ Library Thing

During several long winter months when I was between jobs and fed up with painting my dining room, I discovered LibraryThing. I proceeded to catalog all of the books on my shelves and haven't logged in again since. Unfortunately, I have forgotten my username and/or password and LT has an annoying feature that automatically signs you up for a new account if you happen to enter in a username that is not in use, and a password. So as I tried to figure out what name and password I had previously used, I think I signed up for about four new accounts. In the end, I gave up and decided to start all over. *7-18 update: thanks to Miriam's creative suggestion, I was able to find my old LibraryThing account and linked it to my blog!*

I do enjoy LibraryThing immensely but I don't think it is the easiest service to navigate. For example, there is no way to get away from the "Edit Titles" page without hitting the back button.

In exploring Library Thing, I stumbled upon the faq, "How Can Libraries Use LibraryThing?" This is what the LT creators suggest:

"Fully integrate LibraryThing's social data into your catalog using LibraryThing for Libraries. LTFL lets you add tag-based browsing, book recommendations, ratings, reviews and more to your OPAC, by integrating with LibraryThing and its high-quality book data.

Use a LibraryThing widget to display new books or featured books on your library's website. You'll have to create a LibraryThing account, and add the books to it. Then use one of our widgets to generate code that you can just copy and paste into your website. ..."

I like the idea of the LibraryThing widget on a library website to feature new books, popular titles, etc. I also like the idea of a LibraryThing community where people are reviewing and discussing books in their collections.