Generic Clever Blog Title About LibraryThing

Sorry about the title. Anyway, LibraryThing (hee!) was simplicity itself when it came time to set up an account and add books. Thinking of books worth adding was a bit more of a challenge. I own more than my share, probably, but not that much that I really want to start inviting comparisons, and I've got enough that I want to read, that I'm really not searching for recommendations at the moment. But, since it was assigned, I did enter seven titles (so far) in my LibraryThing library.

Six of those titles I actually own, and one I recently borrowed from the library. But I entered it here just for no good reason other than I could. Truth be told, I've recently run into a problem at work--too many books on hold so now I can't place any more on hold. And all these great graphic novels are coming through that I want to read (or at least place holds on) and I'm out of room on my holds list. So I was wondering if LibraryThing might be a convenient way for me to start building another list. And it does seem to have possibilities. And I'll have to try scanning some ISBNs at work sometime.

Anyway, at first I thought I searched for works by the Beatles and the DVD Dr. Strangelove and couldn't find anything and thought that was a major stumbling block. LibraryThing only deals with books? Pretty limited view of the concept of libraries. So I blogged about that. Then I read another posting by one of my Project Play classmates who mentioned entering some videos into his library and figured I might have missed something. So I went back and looked some more. Well, turns out I didn't do enough poking around. My bad. So now I'm revising my original post. (I wonder if anyone will notice...)

So I searched the Beatles again and I did notice some problems with authority control. When I searched on the term "Beatles" as an "authors" I came up with six hits: Beatles, The Beatles, The Beatles, Beatles Cdmsim218481 ; Richard (introduction) The Beatles; Brautigan ; and, McCartney, Starr, Harrison. Beatles. Lennon.

Well. That isn't good. That it seems to be acceptable just makes me less likely to treat LibraryThing as a useful tool and more like an amusement. Authority control seems to be important to a lot of our library catalog users. I know, because I get a lot of messages from users asking me to fix headings that are incorrect. So when it comes to one stop searching of the LibraryThing database, well, they don't seem to have that as a feature.

There's also the problem (for us anal-retentive catalogers) of the GMD that some people seem to want to add, and others don't and some who want to use [CD] (with and without brackets) instead. And I couldn't find a list of song titles for the albums. There was talk on the site about how they use library records and I stumbled across the term MARC record, but I didn't see anything that I would recognize as a MARC record, although I did find a pretty extensive list of subject headings when I looked up Ulysses by James Joyce, some of which seemed to be more about the history of the novel than the work itself, (but I nitpickingly digress).

The record for Ulysses that I looked at had a lengthy list of subject headings in one view, in addition to the member tags which, in the absence of a controlled vocabulary, seem to overlap and repeat themselves (Ireland, Irish, irish fiction, Irish literature, Irish writers, Irland, british, British literature, english, English literature, modern, modern library, modern lit, modernism). I'm guessing this helps with keyword searching. Knowing how to spell the word Ireland might be even more helpful. (Again with the nitpicking)

Granted, Library of Congress Subject Headings have their limitations as far as ease of use and lack of ready mapping to the current vernacular, but I'm not sure that we could make the argument that member tags supplied by any user would be an improvement. Lots of fiction and literary works now in our catalog have subject and genre headings and many will have summaries (not necessarily in the MARC record itself unfortunately, and, therefore, not keyword accessible) that users can access remotely. But I think our bibliographical records are pretty good. I think so because a lot of us work pretty hard on them. And we're a little more disciplined about what we'll add to our records than a lot of the users of LibraryThing seem to be.

So, could it be that that's what the LibraryThing is actually "selling?" Giving users a place to do something they can't do in our catalog? Because what our users can't do, among other things, is add tags to our bib records, and review or summarize or comment on the individual works. Or claim any kind of "ownership." Because our library's bibliographic records aren't personal. They're public.

But we assume our patrons want privacy. And we respect our patrons' privacy.

And may I just note that one thing we're not really finding out about patrons who use LibraryThing are the books that are in their libraries that they don't mention in their LibraryThing libraries. I searched the terms "divorce yourself" and got three hits. Only one owner per book. We have books like that in our library. They're sold on amazon.com. But perhaps there are certain works that people don't feel the need to hang onto after a certain point in their lives. Or maybe they own some books that they're not comfortable "sharing."

That's fine, of course. In a sharing milieu like LibraryThing, users are under no obligation to enter every title of every book they own, let alone every book they've ever read. I don''t know if it means anything when people take the time to write about James Joyce's work, but not about the book they used to repair their car or lawnmower. Lots of people claim ownership of The God delusion by Richard Dawkins but not too many find it worth mentions that they own books on bedwetting.

So I have to ask, are LibraryThing users trying to share what they consider to be good works with strangers, or are they trying to paint a flattering picture of themselves--for people they'll probably never have to meet? Or is it a little of both?

Your comments, as always, are welcome.