Thought some of you might be interested in this anecdote...
--- On Thu, 12/18/08, John Jaeger <johnja_at_DBU.EDU> wrote:
From: John Jaeger <johnja_at_DBU.EDU>
Subject: [DIG_REF] Library 2.0 Success Story
To: DIG_REF_at_LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Date: Thursday, December 18, 2008, 3:58 PM
One of our librarians, Scott Jeffries, shared this success story related to
using LibraryThing. I thought you might like to see it as well.
Dr. John Jaeger
Doctoral Research and
Reference Librarian
Dallas Baptist University
--------------
Last Friday, I received a call at the reference desk from a student looking for
a book. The problem was that this student did not know the title of the book or
the author. All she could tell me was the book was a collection of letters
between a London antiquities dealer and an American writer and that they
discussed literature and building a collection. I made a couple of rudimentary
attempts while she was on the phone but I was getting no where. I told her that
I would have to call her back after I searched a little more. I thought this
might take some time but I didn't realize how difficult it would be to
locate this book.
Here were some of the terms I punched into Google and Amazon to try to locate
the book - London literature antiques dealer collection writing letter. All of
these terms will trigger many results dealing with antiques and shops and
purchasing and dealing but I was getting no where near a book that resembled the
one I was looking for. The closest I got was a book called Letters from London
but this was not the correct book. My search in WorldCat was giving me incorrect
results as well. I was getting frustrated and was about ready to call this
student to let her know that I couldn't distinguish which book she was
looking for until I thought I would try one more thing.
My search experiences with LibraryThing have been good (quick and accurate
results). Still, those experiences had been with books that I knew the title or
author. What could I do in LibraryThing to locate the book? On the search page,
they have a way to search for tags. I suddenly realized that if you were going
to tag this book you would use some of the terms that I had been using with no
luck in Google. So I tried the tag string of London, letters, literature, New
York, classics. Their tagmash search feature (it can take several minutes) gave
me as a first option the book 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. The
reviews and descriptions of the book identified the book as the one I was
looking for.
By being a LibraryThing user and being accustomed to tagging things I could
easily put myself in the shoes of someone who would inventory this particular
book. I simply chose the terms that I thought they would use to tag this book
and I found the book.
This is a perfect example of the social aspect of finding information. Whenever
someone tagged this book they were wanting to describe the book so they could
locate it later and maybe they had a thought to how other people might discover
the information as well. This was a Web 2.0 success story.
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Received on Thu Dec 18 2008 - 17:45:39 EST