Monday, March 19, 2007

More social stuff

I made an interesting discovery this past weekend and it's called LibraryThing and I LIKE IT! LibraryThing is an online service that allows you to catalogue your personal book collection using tags that choose. You can catalogue up to 200 books for free and if you've got more (and apparently, ALOT of people have ALOT more!) you can choose a yearly or lifetime subscription. According to the website, which has been around since 2006, "LibraryThing uses Amazon and libraries that provide open access to their collections with the Z39.50 protocol." Your books can be arranged on a virtual shelf or as a list.

This site allows for a great deal of social networking. Once you enter a book into your library you are told how many others have copies of that specific book. You can then link to those libraries. You can check out other libraries on the site and submit comments about their libraries. There are forums for people with similar book interests and you can recommend books to others.

I've posted a link to mylibrary on the sidebar of this blog. It randomly pulls up 3 books from my library.You can click on the mylibrary link and view the books in my library. I have about 100 books entered. I was astonished to learn that some libraries on this site have thousands of books!

I was impressed with the many different forums and also with the possibilities to discuss some of my favourite books with people I might otherwise never come into contact with.

Check it out.





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