Catalog Your Books Online with Library Thing
Want to catalog your personal collection of books and share your list to friends and other people? You can do so with the use of the Library Thing (Beta), “an online service to help people catalog their books easily, find people with similar libraries, get suggestions from people with your tastes and so forth.”
I signed up for a free account to test and explore it. If you are a not a librarian, you would definitely embrace the idea and would start cataloging your books. But being a cataloger by profession, I have some reservation regarding the concept though. Library Thing could be simply describe as Friendster via Books. It is a social networking tools. And as such anybody can use it. It is therefore tantamount to saying that anybody can be a cataloger.
But then not. Cataloging is not simply publishing a certain collection of books, assigning a randomly selected uncontrolled tags to identify it and publishing it online via an online software.
Cataloging is a process. It involves more than describing and tagging a book. It is an analytical process that adheres to international standards and guidelines.
Library Thing is a good social networking service. It’s fun and it’s helpful. Use it if you must.
Thanks for writing about it. I understand your reservations. I share them to a point.
I think tags are useful for some things. Take “queer” or “Christian living,” two terms that mean something to a lot of people, but that the LC subject headings would not touch. For example, Maupin’s “Tales of the City” has been tagged as “queer” in LibraryThing. The best the LC can do is “City and town life fiction.” Does anyone hanker for that?
At the same time, I don’t think tags are the “solution” to cataloging. Far from it. Note that LibraryThing picks up Deweys, LC call nos and LC subject headings whenever you use a library that delivers Marc records. In the near future, I’ll be applying them to books even when the record came from Amazon. There’s no question that this stuff is useful, librarian or not.
More basically, tags are at their most useful when they’re your own. I don’t know about you, but I keep my books by subject, and those subjects are my own, not the LCs. I have all my historiography together. I have all my books on Alexander the Great together. These might corespond with LC subjects, but what about my “magic” section. My ancient magic would be together in the LC—although I can tell you some would be in the PAs with the rest of Classical Literature—but I’ve combined all my magic books (sociology, ethnography, Medieval magic, Egyptian magic) in one section. They’re together because they mean something together to me. So on LibraryThing I tag them all “magic.” Surely this is useful?
Ultimately classification has some relationship to findability. If tags help people find books their own books, or other books in their interests, that’s to the good. The authority and structure of a LC subject heading can also assist in findability. I see them as helpmates in the same quest.
Comment by Tim — December 16, 2005 @ 1:04 pm
Thanks for the comment Tim. And for understanding my reservations. I could not agree more on your point regarding the importance of “tags” especially with the emergence of the Library 2.0 phenomenon. And don’t get me wrong also, like you I often question the “relevance” of the LCSH when it comes to identifying the exact subject scope of a particular book. That’s why in the library where I worked for, we abandon the use of LCSH and developed our own Thesaurus.
But then, there would be a lot of librarians who would raised their eyebrows upon learning of what the LibraryThing is doing. Especially those “traditional librarians”.
But as for me, like I said, LibraryThing is useful and at the same time fun. Good luck on your endevour.
Comment by aczafra — December 16, 2005 @ 4:27 pm
“… we abandon the use of LCSH and developed our own Thesaurus.” Yipes!
Again, thanks for covering it. I want to keep LibraryThing in contact with the librarian community. The various tag gurus tend to act as if nobody had ever thought deeply about these issues before.
Cheers, Tim
Comment by Tim — December 17, 2005 @ 12:23 am