Librarything

Ah, Librarything. This little tool is helping me send my kids to a better school. You see, I got completely fed up with the horrific public schools in my area last year and my father introduced me to a tiny private school that needed somebody who could set up their school library. They had no budget for library automation whatsoever, but I discovered that I could inventory the books the school owned by using Librarything. Here's the link to the page I set up for the school.

http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=StPetersClassical

As you can see, we've got 878 books in our collection right now. I can instruct the teachers and students to open up "your library" and they will see a database that shows a shelflist they can manipulate. I've got the Dewey numbers in the comments section, and I've done a little half-hearted tagging; while tagging must serve as our subject search, for the moment, the collection is so small it's often easier just to go straight to the shelf, and I've focused my efforts on other things more. It's not the best possible catalog we can have, but it might be the best we can have for free. I find the recommended books to be tantalizing; sometimes I see books we could really use, but we rely most on donations from parents and I don't really have a book budget.

In terms of this Web 2.0 workshop - yes, I know Librarything really well. A little tidbit - don't rely on the Dewey call numbers that go with some of the book hits you get when you go to add a book. Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are vague at best or completely unreliable - that's when I have to go to WorldCat. Among the cool things - it's really interesting to see the author clouds to determine who we have the most of. It's also kind of interesting - albeit a little unsettling - to see which of my authors are living and which are dead.