Things 14 & 15: LibraryThing

I have been using Librarything in earnest since the spring of 2009. Part of the stimulus was when Clare & I joined the CamLETS local exchange token system, and had the idea that one of the services we might offer was the loan of music scores. I have listed all our individual scores, and a few of the anthologies. A random selection from that catalogue is now embedded as a widget in this Blurtmetry blog.

My long-term intention is to catalogue the rest of the music anthologies, and the poetry books and magazines.

As in more than one other case, I have found that 23things has rekindled my interest and led me to explore the resource further. I am delighted, in going through Librarything, to find the reviews that Librarythingers have added to their catalogue entries. A similar service is offered by Amazon, I know; I am not going to ignore the links between Librarything and Amazon, but I felt that Librarything was inflicting less pressure to buy.

I have toyed with the idea of creating an additional Librarything account for the Haddon Library. My thinking was that this would enable the kind of book-tagging by readers that seemed good when I was discussing Thing 8. However, any such project, if it was to grow and prosper, would require a properly-thought-through plan rather than a hasty implementation as part of my 23things homework. The Haddon has enough plans on the go at the moment.

I have heard rumours that the Aquabrowser project may come to enable tagging across the University's collections. I have added the Cambridge Library Widgets blog to my Google reader, and will keep an eye open for these developments.

Thing 8: Tagging

Have followed all the links and updated the tags in my blog. I can see I had better read The cult of the amateur; from the review, I suspect I would have more to say about it under Thing 22, Wikis, than at the present point in the agenda.

The Haddon Library uses the Bliss Classification Scheme. If you are familiar with Bliss, you will know that it builds classmarks by combination, which can make them inordinately long. At the Haddon, our way round that is to limit the specificity of any given book's classmark, and/or the number of facets of the book's subject that the classmark may cover. If necessary, we include additional classmarks in the catalogue record; and the English-language translations of those main and added classmarks are in the catalogue record as well, functioning like Library of Congress Subject Headings.

It is quite a job to keep these translations consistent with one another and with current usage, both specialist and non-specialist, and I can see a lot of point, the more so in a subject library, in letting readers augment the catalogue record with tags of their own.