Social Cataloging

Social cataloging websites are places where people can create personal catalogs of their book, DVD, CD, and game collections and share them with others. Members of these communities can write reviews of books and other media, rate items, tag, and discover other users who own the same items in their collections.

Library Thing

• A social online book cataloging application which searches the Library of Congress, Amazon, and 132 other libraries for records
• Over 33 million books have been cataloged on Library Thing surpassing the collection of Harvard
• Over 563,000 users

Features

• Provides view both social and book information about each book, including Marc records
• View the Zeitgeist to see what's popular
• Detailed user profiles
• Catalogs can be made private or public
• View users' collections on a Virtual Shelf or in list format
• Contains a large number of book reviews
• Allows widgets to be put on blogs to let others know what's in your library
• LibraryThing for Libraries service integrates tagging, other editions, book recommendations, ratings, and reviews in the library OPAC

Great Tools for:

• Cataloging book collections
• Enabling patron participation
• Marketing

How Are Libraries Using It?

• As a way to feature new books in their catalog
• To highlight new titles and their cover art on their website
• To integrate social features into their OPAC
• To create a social library catalog (custom-built)
• To enable social and participatory features into their catalog (custom-built)

Other cataloging applications

• Shelfari
• Lib.rario.us
• All Consuming

Hands-on

• Go to LibraryThing
• Create an Account
• Add a book to your library, i.e. Da Vinci Code