Thing 14 - LibraryThing

I'm liking LibraryThing. Maybe it's because I 'get' this sharing site - I want to catalog & tag my books because that has value to me, and then I share that information with others because it can be mutually beneficial.

The site's basic features are really easy to use -- I input a few of my books into my LT library. I really like the option of viewing your library as the bookcovers instead of a list. Even better, it seems to have some fairly high-powered features for input and editing. For example, you can do a global edit on a tag, or select a set of books from your library and add a tag to or remove a tag from all of them at once . Also, you can add books by importing files and synch your LibraryThing collection with a master list you keep elsewhere. But the absolutely coolest thing was the barcode scanner they sell -- CueCat -- with which you can more speedily import your book info by scanning in the ISBN. Sweet. I am seriously considering putting this on my Christmas list.

I understand LibraryThing is also offering its tag content on a subscription basis to libraries who add it to their OPAC data. I'd be really interested to see any good data on how useful this additional content is for library users. Professor John Riedl at the U of M and colleagues have done some research on community tagging. I guess the upshot is that tagging can be very useful -- as long as it is of sufficiently high quality -- which is not inevitable.

Thing 11 - Social bookmarking @ del.icio.us

I resurrected a moribund del.icio.us account from a previous web 2.0 learning endeavor and actually added a few bookmarks. Having my bookmarks available at any computer seems like it could be very convenient, but I'd have to see how it actually played out in real life. I'm still trying to get a handle on how useful it would be for collaborative work. As with a lot of these tools, the application in an education setting seems obvious (the podcast tutorial on del.icio.us mentions reading lists and syllabi) but discovering a useful library application proves more challenging.

I like the additional information available about a site through seeing how many others have linked to it and how they have tagged it. It would be interesting to "mine" the site to see what others thought was valuable enough to bookmark on a topic of interest to me. Helene Blowers in the podcast refers to the 'magic middle'. The idea is that when other people look at stuff and bookmark it, the good stuff is what gets bookmarked most often. This provides filtering by authority -- it helps pull out the useful information from the vast sea that is all web content. To the extent that a tool like del.icio.us can achieve that end, i.e. assisting me to find the 'good stuff', it would be very valuable.

I also downloaded the bookmarklet from del.icio.us to my browser. I can only hope it is helpful and not annoying. It's kind of hard to tell before you use the feature over time. We'll see. I noted that there are uninstall instruction in the help section at del.icio.us. :)

Back to library applications of this tool. I took a quick look at the Maui Community College Library's bookmarks on del.icio.us. and tried to find out how they were using this tool. I found the link to their del.icio.us bookmarks buried on the library's website under "About Us" under a subcategory "Our Current Interests". It's hard to assess this. Obviously it's not being presented as a real tool for students or faculty. Is it just a collection of bookmarks that the librarians find interesting? So, it's out there, but what is it's use?