Thing #14: LibraryThing

I like the idea of LibraryThing, but if a person really got into it, 200 books probably isn't very many titles.  I'm not ready to pay for it at this point.  I did add a widget on this blog.

Using it in a library:  

1. Reader's Advisory - useful to tag titles by whatever descriptors you remember about the book.  I can't always remember author or title names these days, but I might remember "castle" or "wales", for instance.
2. New Book Lists - might be worth looking into this for my monthly book list that I publish.   There could be a widget on the library's web page for the new books.
   
3. Non-profit Pricing - $15/year for 5000 titles is very inexpensive.

Things that could use improvement:

1. Offer more than 200 books for a free account.
2. I found the option to search books by a series, but it took a little bit of effort to find that.  It would be nice to have an easier series search on the main page and to add all of the series books by placing checkmarks in boxes.
3. Add covers for some of the older books.

I currently research new books and publish a printed list each month for new books in our library system.  I write a longer list (100-150 titles) that gets emailed out through a Yahoo Groups listserv each month.  It's a lot of work, since I'm so busy with many other things.  Sometimes no information is available yet on titles that are still on order and I have to hunt down information on author, publisher and other library sites.  I wish I could get other staff to participate and assist on this, since there are so many popular authors these days, but so far that idea hasn't been successful.  I'm not sure that I'd want to add LibraryThing as one more place to post the lists when I can barely keep up with the ones I do now.