Library Thing!

ibrary thing is a way to organize your books and share them with others. I've known about it for a while, but never felt like it was something I had any need for. For personal use, it seems to be more for people who own a lot of books, or are looking for social recommendations. I think it really shines as a tool for small libraries to get cataloged, to get some kinda tiny PAC. My friend uses it for that purpose, for her library: Paper Fort.

Paper Fort is a fledgling zine library that already has about 550 titles cataloged, and hundreds more to do. Right now the collection will be displayed at Rhino's but the lady who runs it, Sparky, has been looking for a permanent space to house it. It's going to be really sweet to see it all sorted and displayed.

She uses LibraryThing in the way that makes sense to me. It seems like a powerful PAC replacer, and for small libraries could be invaluable. But it doesn't have to replace a catalog, it could be used to add additional functionally to a system; I think we could benefit from using LibraryThing.

One of the great things about LibraryThing, is the sheer number of tags on each item. It is another way to search and find what you are looking for. Tags are great because the people who actually used the system, and the items, put in words or phrases that they thought were good descriptors of the book. You don't have to rely on one person's, or a group of people's opinion on what the book is, one person doesn't have to decide where it gets classified, but that decisions is made as a group, a shared decision about what it is, and what else is like it.

I like wikis. I think that they are great for collaboration and sharing information. I've used them in the past for classes and they really did help. One of the things that I want to do here at the library is have a circulation wiki that is useful. On LInt we have a very underutilized wiki, I want to make it better. One of the things I see for circulation is a cross linked meeting notes (like this) knowledge base. We could also have things that people find useful, but don't warrant an inclusion on the LInt pages, like this list of addresses in Monroe county.
we could have better formatted notes, and have them be really searchable. Things that we talked about in more then one meeting to the next could be joined. Discussion could occur on a page behind it, like this. We could use pages like this to have discussions about the nitty gritty of policy. I like them more then blogs for the library. I think that once a style is established it would make discustions easier to follow then a threaded system. I want to be able to find what I am looking for, and I can't really with the current system. The search on LInt is hard to use, and I don't know if I'm finding good info or outdated policy and most of what I do get returned is unrelated. I think that it could be so much better.
I feel that one of the most talked about concerns that people have with wikis is the freely editable nature of them. That if we put these things up, someone is going to change what they say. I don't think this is an issue. I think that we can trust people enough to be responsible with the access and ability to edit things. If there are things that people don't want messed with, like the policy manual, then we can lock it down and restrict who can edit it. All changes could be submitted to a "keeper" and they would be the ones to make the changes. But I think that that is too much, unless their is a problem. We wouldn't need to do this from the start. Because f people were ever malicious and messed with policy, we can see what they did because every post, every change, is signed and dated and archived automatically. If someone abuses the system we will know who did it, when they did it, and what they did. And what they did can be reverted with a click of a button. People who abuse it could have their editing privileges removed. But I don't think it would ever come to that. We've got a great group of people working here and I don't think that they would do that.