Visit to LibraryThing can bring together readers and collectors
Dec 02, 2007
By Katie Haegele
Have you heard of this thing called LibraryThing? It's kind of like playing librarian. You use the site's software to catalog your own book collection, and for free you can list up to 200 books.
But maybe the point of cataloging your book collection isn't immediately manifest to you. It wasn't to me. I read a lot, but I don't keep all the books I read, nor do I keep a record of them. I do, however, treasure my zine collection, both for the zines' content and for their value as cultural artifacts. I thought it might be interesting to account for the ones I've hoarded over the years, so I sat down at my laptop with a mug of tea and a few teetering stacks of these handmade, homemade publications and got to work.
To add a regular book, I could enter its title, author, or ISBN number to search the Library of Congress, Amazon.com, or one of several other book databases, most of which are university libraries from around the world. I wasn't adding regular books, though, so I figured I'd have to add my zines manually.
But I happen to know that Jenna Freedman, coordinator of reference services and zine librarian at the Barnard College library, has added a collection of more than 1,700 zines to her library. They all get proper entries in the main Columbia Libraries catalog (CLIO), and when I saw that I could search CLIO through LibraryThing, my heart got a little fluttery. Each time I entered a zine that lives in Barnard's collection, it popped right up, and all I had to do was click on its title to add it to my catalog. And wow, was that satisfying.
Users can organize their books with the Library of Congress and Dewey systems, or they can make up their own tags: feminism, Victoriana, baseball history. Some tags are idiosyncratic and have only personal meaning, but others are more generally useful - so much so that the site offers a "LibraryThing for libraries" option, which allows a library to integrate user-generated tags into its cataloging system.
Barbara Fister, an academic librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, likes the idea of using both.
"Cataloging is labor-intensive and expensive, and since catalogers can't read all the books they catalog - especially at the Library of Congress, whose cataloging is adopted by many other libraries - not enough subject headings are included anymore. Having readers add their own is a nifty development and sort of exemplifies the DIY zeitgeist in a world where cataloging by the rules has fallen into decline because it's too costly," Fister said.
For those who want to meet people who share their taste in books, the site can serve as a social network.
Once my zines were added, all the other users who have them in their collections got linked to my page. Some of these, I soon saw, weren't personal collections but small libraries, infoshops, and other public collections that are using the site as a catalog.
This is what Casey Brough was busily doing the other day; I watched his library's zine collection grow one afternoon from seven to 22 to more than 100. Brough is an assistant librarian at Plymouth Regional High School in New Hampshire, which recently added zines. The library circulates them on the honor system, but no one had formally cataloged them. Brough and librarian Pam Harland both use LibraryThing for their personal collections and decided it would be a good place for the zine collection, too.
"I think it's a great resource for small library collections, especially if they don't have the resources to purchase and maintain a traditional [and expensive] integrated library system," said K.R. Roberto, serials/electronic resources librarian at the University of Denver's Penrose Library.
Other librarians I talked to said they had used similar sites, such as GoodReads.com, which doesn't have tags but lets users organize their books onto different "shelves." Both sites allow users to review books they've read, making use of what Fister calls the "social dimensions of reading. "
"People have always interacted with books, talked to others about them, brought different ones together so they can have a good brawl," she said. "Sites like LibraryThing make reading less obviously solitary, but it's never been truly solitary. We're always rewriting the books we read and pulling them into wider conversations. Now it's just a little easier - and more fun. "
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