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The Next Best Thing to Your Own Personal Librarian

  Reading time 2 minutes

Daniel’s recent posts focused on social bookmarking tools, which use the power of social networking to help users find websites that suit their interests. On a similar note, I thought I’d share one of my favorite tools, LibraryThing, which serves a similar purpose for books. For those not familiar with this resource, it is an online service that allows people to keep and share their favorite (or least favorite) books. A free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. Paid accounts allow you to catalog as many as you wish and start at $10 for a year or just $25 for a lifetime!

Even if you don’t keep your own list of books, LibraryThing is a great resource for finding just the right book for a lazy day at the beach or for a classroom assignment. Its strength lies in the tags that members have provided to categorize their entries. As any librarian will tell you, readers advisory—the practice of recommending books based on a reader’s interests—is a fine art. For example, knowing that you like Harry Potter, a good advisor should be able to tell you that you should also like the Bartimaeus Trilogy. Similarly, a good advisor might be able to recommend esoteric literature with a particular theme, e.g., Chick Lit that takes place in Greece.

My favorite way to find books on LibraryThing is to search using tags (which are the same as key words). If you want to combine tags, you can separate your key concepts with commas. This search is called a tagmash, and it can provide you with some interesting results. For example, a search for World War II fiction retrieves some expected and some unexpected results, including: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, Atonement by Ian McEwan, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden and Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson.

Once you find a title you want to read, you can connect with your local library catalog via the WorldCat link. Before you know it you will be enjoying a new book that you might have otherwise never discovered.

2 thoughts on “The Next Best Thing to Your Own Personal Librarian

  1. Hey Melissa, have you heard of goodreads.com? A friend of mine asked me to sign up recently so we can get good book recommendations and discuss whatever we’re reading lately. I just haven’t had a chance to create an account yet.

  2. I haven’t heard of that one but certainly sounds like one to take a look at. Another one of my favorites, especially this time of year when student are looking for textbooks is Book Burro (a plug in for windows machines using Firefox) there is a similar plugin for macs called Library Books. This one is cool because it tells you if a library has a particular book and also which online book sellers sell it and at what cost.

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