At 10:18 PM -0400 6/21/06, Sue Woodson wrote:
>I have the same question. There are lots of better ways to get and
>manage metadata about books. If I were trying to catalog my books I'd go
>to WorldCat for metada and if I were an unafilliated scholar I'd use
>RedLightGreen, Open WorldCat or the Library of Congress catalog. If you
Well, for just one thing, using LibraryThing is a LOT quicker than
doing what you are proposing. I 'cataloged' (or at any rate, prepared
a bibliographic database including) several hundred books in probably
three hours. This resulted in a searchable database of my books on
the web.
How would you do with RedLightGreen or Open WorldCat, or the LC
catalog (and incidentally, LibraryThing does import from the LC
catalog, although it doesn't neccesarily use the full MARC record, it
kind of dumbs down the metadata). Just searching for, identifying,
and downloading all the relevant records would take two to three to
four times as long. And then how do I make them into a searchable
database on the web?
Even the interfaces provided to paying users (catalogers) of OCLC's
bib database are not as quick or as convenient or easy to use as the
LibraryThing interface. This is not an inherent problem, it is
something that can be fixed, of course.
But that's who is using LibraryThing, people who want to create a
database of their personal book collections. It works quite well for
that purpose. Who wants to do this? Probably mostly book geeks who
want to show off their book collections to others, is my guess.
(Guilty). Or just people who want to keep track of what books they
have for their own personal satisfaction (also probably an indicator
of book-geekdom).
--Jonathan
>are serious about keeping a catalog there's software like RefWorks and
>EndNote.
>
>Who keeps catalogs of their books anyway? Are these people who loan
>their books out and keep track of who has them?
>
>Sue
>
>
>
>>>> ross.singer_at_LIBRARY.GATECH.EDU 06/21/06 8:55 PM >>>
>So, in a meeting today (in a group that is designing our community
>contributed catalog, Communicat) we were discussing LibraryThing.
>
>Who uses this? And for what? It seems a... somewhat pointless service.
>
>Regardless of how useful it may be to actually get the metadata and
>whatnot.
>
>-Ross.
Received on Thu Jun 22 2006 - 11:57:27 EDT