From LibraryThing to our Catalog

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I really like the personal-list feature of our new catalog. It's particularly convenient to have a list that links right into our catalog so you can check call numbers and availability. On the other hand, our lists are also limited in an important way: There's no way to add items that we don't own. Depending on how you want to use your list, this might be a serious drawback. In addition, there's no way for you currently to share or publish your list, or to browse other patrons' lists.

Enter LibraryThing.

LibraryThing is a fantastic online service that allows you to catalog your entire library on the web. As with our catalog's personal lists, you will be able to access your LibraryThing collection from any computer connected to the internet. You can organize your collection, let friends and/or strangers browse it, see what other people are reading, read and publish reviews, get recommendations for similar items, participate in book discussions (sometimes even with the author!), and more. Adding books to your collection is as easy as typing in a title or an ISBN number.

What's more, LibraryThing just got better for patrons of Henry Carter Hull. Here's how: I've added the formula for finding a book in our catalog to LibraryThing's database. Once you have a LibraryThing account, you will be able to arrange to have a link to our catalog show up on your book pages. If you find a book you're interested in, you can search for it on our catalog with the click of a mouse.

Caveats:

• Unlike our catalog's lists which are equally good for all kinds of materials, LibraryThing is primarily about books.
• Your first 200 books on LibraryThing are free, but after that there is a small fee.
• If your primary interest is in reading other people's reviews, you might prefer GoodReads, a service I hope to discuss in the near future.

For now, though, I'll just show you how to sign up for LibraryThing and set up the link to our catalog.

• Point your browser to:
  http://www.librarything.com


• Choose a username and password. (That's really all there is to signing up. You don't even need to answer a confirmatory email.)
  
  


• Next you'll need to find a book. You can find books in a variety of ways. Let's say you were looking at my collection—my username is 'kwilibrary'—and you found something you liked. You simply click on the book cover and then choose "View" to go to the main page for that work:
  
  
  
• In a box on the left you'll now see "FIND AT..." followed by a series of links. At this point, our link will not yet show up in your list.
  
  


• On the next, very large page, scroll down on the right to "United States : Public Libraries" and click the word "Add" to the right of our name.


• Our name should now appear in the "your links" box in the upper right hand corner of that very page. You can move our name up in your list by clicking the green arrows. May as well put us at the top, no?
  
  
  


• When you go back to the main page for the book, the box on the left should now look like this:
  
  


• Click that link and "pop," you'll see the results from our catalog. From now on, whenever you're looking at the page for a book, our link will be there on the left. You won't ever have to go through adding it again. Just click on our name to see if we have the book and whether it's available.

That's some serious web magic. There's lots of other stuff you can do with LibraryThing, but I'll leave some of the fun of exploring to you.